Mike Fuqua
Is the typical Enterprise ready for marketing services from the “Cloud?” This question is one that involves more than marketing technology. As more and more services are becoming available over the internet or “the cloud,” the question will be asked, and answered, more frequently. A likely influencing factor is the maturity of the Enterprise’s Datacenter. The datacenter’s evolution may just offer Marketing the flexibility to evaluate more marketing technology options.
The question that is even more important is whether or not Marketing understands enough about the Cloud to potentially influence the Enterprise Datacenter so that it can support the needs of Marketing and its future.
The Enterprise Datacenter has been rapidly adopting the fundamental technologies of the “Cloud,” such as virtualization technologies of computing, storage and the network. As virtualization and distributed computing grows, the corporate network and datacenter have effectively become service providers within the corporation. This “private cloud,” is what is on the technology marketers’ minds.
It is this “private cloud” that will allow greater flexibility in the Enterprise Datacenter and the cloud will begin to extend capabilities into computing and storage. As data centers begin to accelerate their capabilities to move data to other cloud service providers and are leveraging applications from these service providers, Marketing can benefit. Why? Because integrating multiple data sources is fundamental to the application tools that Marketing utilizes. And, if the data can be easily brought together, then the added abilities extending to various cloud application service providers enables more flexible benefits.
Marketers don’t need to be cloud technologists, but understanding how cloud technology can benefit their needs and understanding the new capabilities for their future application will prove beneficial.
About the Author:
Mike Fuqua is the Chief Technology Officer at SIGMA Marketing Group, a marketing technology and strategy agency. Connect with Mike on or follow him on .
