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March - 2014 - issue > CEO Spotlight
The Next Frontier for Smarter Customer Experiences
Ravi Chandran
CEO -XtremeData, Inc.
Friday, March 7, 2014
Today the trends in the computing industry are easy to spot: we just need to look at the cover of any trade magazine: BigData-Cloud-Mobility. The nexus of these three trends is causing seismic disruptions at a scale not seen since the introduction of the PC in the eighties.
As an architect of high-performance computing systems, I lived through the era from Mainframes to Mini-computers to Unix workstations to PCs. The first shift in the current disruption started in the mid-2000's with the convergence towards Linux on x86 CPUs. This in itself, independent of the BigData-Cloud-Mobility trends, created a homogeneous environment where OS virtualization could take root and spread rapidly. This homogeneity and OS virtualization directly led to the possibility of application deployment on shared infrastructure, a.k.a. the Cloud.

The advent of BigData was the other major disruption factor. Legacy technologies were overwhelmed by large volumes of structured data (machine logs, click-streams, online advertising impression & click logs, etc.,) and loosely- or un-structured data (emails, tweets, call-center logs, audio, video, etc.,). Legacy relational databases were incapable of scaling to TBs at reasonable cost. This initially spawned the movement towards Hadoop and "NoSQL" technologies, but today, a few years into it, there is a resurgence towards "newSQL" solutions that do not have the deficiencies of legacy solutions. This is what we have built at XtremeData: an analytic SQL engine designed to scale in the Cloud.

These disruptions in the industry are actually a boon to entrepreneurs. The Cloud democratizes computing infrastructure: anyone anywhere in the world now has access to state-of-the art hardware, on-demand, paid for by the hour. Similarly, the challenges of BigData are opportunities for entrepreneurs, since there are no established incumbent solutions. Perhaps the biggest challenge for entrepreneurs is the flip-side of all this: low barriers to entry, and therefore plenty of competition!

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