Jack Kiernan, Senior Sales Engineer, KX
According to a Gartner forecast earlier this year, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% in 2022 to a total of $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021. Next year, end-user spending is anticipated to reach nearly $600 billion. And while Gartner admits that CIOs “are beyond the era of irrational exuberance of procuring cloud services,” it remains “the powerhouse that drives today’s digital organizations” and can help them achieve the meaningful business and technology outcomes needed to succeed. This sentiment seemed to be shared among many at the recent STAC Summit in New York City and reinforces an important industry shift toward cloud-driven architecture as a future way of working.
Cloud Considerations for the STAC Community
The STAC community, comprised of the STAC Benchmark Council, regularly brings together CTOs and other industry leaders responsible for solution architecture, infrastructure engineering, and operational intelligence to discuss critical challenges in trading and investment.
Cloud adoption, whether in full or hybrid, can help address many of the technical issues these audiences face. Still, perhaps more importantly, it helps ensure companies can enable the kind of new, innovative approaches that drive competitive advantage. Many organizations benefit, for example, from both the storage capacity and the compute elasticity cloud offers. Data storage can be scaled up instantly, and the cloud is ideal for burst processing when needed. But to truly maximize value from the cloud, leaders must ensure their broader technology investments can optimize its use and support growing (i.e., demanding) business requirements. Data volumes will only increase, after all, and data landscapes will only get more complex.
To unlock its full potential for your organization, ensure your stack strengthens its impact with solutions that can also:
- Enhance interoperability — If you can’t bring your own tools to work (Python, SQL, etc.), you’re making it harder to develop the applications and strategies needed to stay ahead of the competition. Interfaces to Python, SQL, PostgreSQL, and other technologies enable users to continue using existing tools and skills and accelerate time to derive insights without compromising performance or functionality.
- Accelerate machine learning workloads — In the Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise Survey (2020), 83% of respondents said that AI will be critical or very important to their organizations’ success within the next two years. Another two-thirds of respondents said they currently use ML as part of their AI initiatives, programs of which a majority currently use or plan to use cloud infrastructure in some form.
In Closing, An Invitation
The velocity and volume of data are continuing to grow, as is the need for performing analyses even faster; no doubt, cloud is a vital tool in today’s technology arms race, but the right partners can help realize its full ROI.
Here at KX – maker of kdb+, independently benchmarked by STAC as the world’s fastest time-series database – we equip the most ambitious companies with a flexible, high-performance analytics engine that meets this moment. Not only have KX customers deployed kdb+ and other KX solutions on numerous public, private and hybrid clouds (including the three leading cloud vendors), but developers have the flexibility to use an industry-standard programming language of their choice.
If you’d like to continue this discussion or learn more about KX, please join us at the upcoming STAC Summit, on November 30, 2022, in London. We’d love to hear from you!
