Recently I’ve become fascinated by the topic of Big Data – essentially how new technologies and techniques are allowing the near-real time analysis of massive volumes of data to uncover useful insights. It is a field that is evolving rapidly, and no doubt is somewhat over-hyped, but story after story tells how new analysis techniques are yielding genuine advantage for the organisations wielding them.

The brilliant thing about Big Data is that it allows organisations to get an additional advantage out of an asset that they already own – one which can be augmented by taking data that is freely available, such as from Web traffic and data logs, to deliver new insights.

I’ll be posting a lot more on Big Data this year, but if you want to get a sense of what’s possible, check out this article I recently wrote for BRWk.

I’ve been watching for some time the growth of cloud computing, and particularly the model of delivering software as a service (SaaS). But despite the name, in reality it is not software that is being delivered at all,  but a business service. Unfortunately ‘service-as-a-service’ doesn’t really make that much sense …

If you look at what SaaS customers are buying, it is not software. Salesforce.com customers are buying a better way to manage their customers. NetSuite clients are buying a better way to manage their overall organisations. And so on, right down the line of SaaS companies. Very few purchasers have any desire to buy software at all – indeed, that is one of the benefits of the ( unfortunately named) SaaS model.

For services businesses then, it is important that they start looking at what they really offer, and which components can be delivered in a SaaS model. Because if they don’t, someone else will. In many cases of course a service still requires a physical delivery – waiters that bring your food in a catering service, etc. But for many others, like call centres, the real value is in the underlying systems that make them work – everything else is just a matter of training and monitoring. Even a catering firm these days is reliant on software systems for customer management, staffing, ordering, invoicing etc.

This is what IPscape realised when it developed its SaaS-based call centre application. It delivers the call centre across the Internet – all its clients need is a web connection and a trained call centre agent.

The beauty of the model is that it is easy to sell and support into foreign markets. There is no product to ship, and as the software is centrally hosted it is easy to maintain. Indeed, the cloud model is a service exporter’s dream.

The model is especially relevant in fast-growing Asian markets, where there is less baggage to be overcome in terms of client’s familiarity with older models of computing. As Internet speeds across Asia improve it is likely that many companies will leapfrog a generation of technology and go straight to the cloud.

That presents a massive opportunity for companies like IPscape, or any service provider which realises that its future lies in the cloud. IPScape has also chosen to work with Telstra to accelerate its Asian strategy, as I described in this story for The Australian published late last year.

Late last year I was invited up to Singapore to hear about Google’s vision for connecting the next 1 billion people to the Internet. One third of the world’s population is now online, but Google expects there is plenty of scope for growth as services become cheaper and more far reaching.

The needs of the next billion Internet users may be very different from those of existing users, creating opportunities for new service providers who can meet those needs in low-cost, innovative ways.

In this story for the SMH IT Pro website I look at Google’s ambitions, and the opportunities that might exist for Australian entrepreneurs to create services for people in emerging online markets. It follows on from a theme I’ve explored in other stories – that Australian entrepreneurs must look to more markets than just North America is they are to maximize the opportunities that are out there, especially as the balance of economic power migrates west across the Pacific Ocean. Australasia’s prosperity is already tied to our north west neighbours when it comes to minerals and energy- the same may also be true for our information and services sector.

Along with the massive explosion that is taking place in global data volumes, a similar explosion is being witnessed in terms of the proliferation of devices that create that data. This goes beyond the rapid spread of smartphones and tablets, toinclude the tens of thousands of sensors of every imaginable kind that are being connected to the Internet every day, that take and report readings on an ongoing basis, usually unattended by humans.

Smart electricity meters are one visible example, but increasingly we are hearing about numerous types of environmental sensors that are being connected up, including at the Sydney bakery Brasserie Bread.

We call this evolving network the Internet of Things, and the underlying technology is described as machine-to-machine communication (m2m), and it was the subject of my cover story for the final edition of CIO Australia magazine for 2012.

First it was the mainframe that was put on the endangered list. Now it is the entire data centre that is threatened with extinction – or at least eviction from the corporate campus. Running a data centre was once a necessary component of running a fair-sized IT organisation. It was the keep at the centre of the IT manager’s castle. But the rise of more pragmatic thinking within business has increasingly seen the question asked ‘why are we running this thing’. Failure to find a compelling answer quickly leads to a discussion about outsourcing the data centre.

That decision is made somewhat easier by the proliferation of well-qualified data centre operators – many of whom offer security and service that the corporate data centre manager might only dream off.

A couple of weeks back now The Australian published three articles that I had written on the topic of data centres. The first was based around an interview with newly-appointed CEO of the data centre operator NextDC, Craig Scroggie, who talked about that company’s ambitious growth plans. You can read that one by clicking here. Another of the stories looked at the criteria that companies use when selecting a data centre operator (you can read that one here) while the third was a profile of the engineering company Downer Group and its decision to relocate its various data centres to Hewlett-Packard’s newly-opened Aurora data centre, west of Sydney (you can read that one here).

In each instance they show that the trend of data centre outsourcing is alive and well in Australia.