Every few years in our industry, we hear proclamations about how the latest technology shift is going to be the one that fundamentally reshapes IT. For the last few years, Cloud computing has looked like a secular movement that would result in all applications eventually moving out of private data centers to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. However, although it was easy to see applications and development platforms moving to the Cloud, it was difficult to conceive how analytics could possibly move to the Cloud. Relational databases were simply not designed for that scale. It was difficult to imagine being able to access, integrate, and analyze the scale of data created by organizations as a managed service in the Cloud. So the conventional wisdom was that Analytics would be the main reason IT organizations would be forced to deal with hybrid IT architectures for decades to come.

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