How the 'market of one' is transforming IT

Flash transformed how consumers interact, shop and navigate. Now it is changing how organisations are architecting their data centres to deliver personalised content

This story is about you: your unique choices, expectations and personality, reflected in how you consume goods and services and interact with the tens of hundreds of brands that you come in contact with every day. It is about how you like to start your Diwali shopping early, take advantage of special discounts crafted just for you and how you regularly use your smartphone to pay your electricity bills during your daily commute. 

It is the expectation that you have instant access to the right information to help you manage everything important in your life, just at the right time. Today's consumers are not a faceless mass of many. Technology has made you 'free agent' to the brands that want your business and more importantly, your loyalty. Technology like this is what enables an e-commerce retailer to plan a 'flash sale', targeting specific consumers looking to purchase specific goods (in the most recent case, a smartphone), at a specific time.

Why does this matter? Because a remarkable, nearly-invisible technology rests at the intersection of billions of people around the world and their personalised content: flash technology.

Flash is one of the biggest technology disruptors in the history of computing. It is the same technology that allows us to store millions of songs on our MP3 players and play - in an instant - one specific song among many, compared to the past when we were reliant on tapes and discs. Now, this transformation is taking place within the technology infrastructure of our favourite brands - the ones that really know us, understand our preferences and give us tailormade experiences.

IDC estimates the all-flash array market will grow to $1.2 billion in revenue by 2015 and is being embraced by Indian companies across sectors for one critical reason: being able to cater to this 'market of one'.

Today we expect brands to know us as individuals and earn our loyalty by delivering all of our information and preferences to our mobile devices as a 'market of one'. Till now, industrialisation made it possible for everyone to get exactly the same product, regardless of where they were located. Today we don't want mass-produced goods and services anymore. We want brands to know exactly what we want and tailor their approach and experience to suit us.

So how does Flash enable this 'market of one'? Buried deep within the IT infrastructure of the brands that we engage with, Flash is central to delivering better performance to databases, virtual environments and analytics. In the past, a query from a mobile device would retrieve static data and serve it up as quickly as possible averaging 10s of data queries. The IT infrastructure could handle this retrieving and serving at the speed of traditional spinning disk drives because it was built to serve a 'market of many'.

For brands to deliver the 'market of one', experience it, means tremendous change is underway with their back-end technology and how their IT departments operate. It takes hundreds of queries to construct what is presented to a user as a 'market of one' and 10 times the increase in the backend activity required to deliver that end user experience. It's a massive change, on an enormous scale.

What does this mean for organisations? It means their IT workloads will require varying levels of scale, performance and capacity. Many of these performance-hungry workloads will continue to evolve to not just use, but rely upon enterprise flash.

Flash transformed how consumers interact, shop, navigate and make buying decisions. Now it is changing how organisations are architecting their data centres to deliver personalised content and convenience, and create a 'market of one' experience.

By Abhijit Potnis, director, Technology Solutions, EMC