Social Media, Mobile Apps, Big Data Analytics and Cloud computing are four distinct technology areas that are seen rapidly evolving. I had an earlier posting about this Four Way Confluence. There are many products that leverage one of these- but the real power is derived by products that use two or more of these in combination. These areas are very interdependent and in fact consumer grade enterprise applications and apps can only be delivered by using all four in tandem as shown in the video. Industry leaders have coined a short single acronym SMAC to indicate the synergy and cohesiveness of these four areas. Let us examine how leveraging one technology area without the other would be limiting.
Synergy between Big Data back end And Social Media interface
Facebook users population exceeds 1.1 billion. Other social media are behind but all of them are generating huge data in text, photo and video form which can be mined by marketers, researchers , recruiters and providers of numerous services – only if we have tools to handle such unprecedented volumes and variety of data that is coming in faster than we can process them. Big Data or NoSQL databases like Hadoop, MondoDB and Cassandra use massively parallel processing to deal with Big Data. The explosion of data can be harnessed for proper use by these tools.
Also social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn use big data analytics when they promote the usage by suggesting friends, trending topics and building social graphs. When I follow someone on twitter ; I instantly get more suggestions which are a result of quickly mining all the tweets for lexical similarities – which is done at lightning speeds by massively parallel processing afforded by big data tools.
Synergy Between Cloud Storage And Big Data back end
Its unimaginable to have large volumes of data without proper management of the same. The need to have backup and disaster recovery process can’t be overemphasized. Cloud offers virtual storage as in the case of Amazon S3, which can grow on demand. No need to worry about installing large hardware and configuring the same as the existing infrastructure deals with data overflow. Cloud computing paradigm allows you to expand or contract storage by merely running a few commands to manage clusters of servers that process big data in massively parallel processing. Cloud based services are now evolving further to offer not only storage but ingestion and processing of big data . Big Data can’t be moved due to its volumes and it needs to be consumed at its source. Ubiquitous nature of cloud storage allows one to capture data near the source no matter where on earth it is.
Synergy between Mobile Apps And Social Media interface
More than 40% of social media updates are originating on mobile devices today. In fact there are many people who experienced internet for the first time on their smartphones. Be it pictures or videos or location updates; mobile devices will soon be used as the default way to interact with social media. One can see the reason why all major social media players like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Linkedin have developed native apps for android and iOS.
Mobile Apps are even more dependent on social media interfaces because users have started moving from email , text messaging and voice calls to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Telecom providers are now feeling the heat as they see their traditional business under threat and they are monetizing Apps by selling valuable marketing insights by selling data captured by free apps enriched by demographic and geo-location context. Marketers can now sharply focus on their target customers using this information.
Synergy between anytime anywhere Cloud Service And Mobile Apps
Besides sharing photos and videos on social media ; mobile users also want to store them for sharing them across multiple devices. Storing them on the cloud provides a mechanism to have the private and shared photos, videos and documents accessible from anywhere at anytime using any device- be it smartphone, laptop or tablet. Cloud storage also serves as a backup in case someone loses his smartphone. Cloud application providers are also providing ways of sharing content selectively on social media. Solutions like GoogleDrive, iCloud, DropBox and SugarSync are already allowing people to upload files from their desktops to view them on their mobile phones and tablets.
