Web Scale led to Data Warehousing – Effects of Disaggregation

Continuing from the previous week, let us explore today, how did these companies grow so fast that we have coined a new term webscale. Let us look at the following:-

• What commodity did they provide?: Primarily Information: filtered, searchable, indexed, contextual etc
• What did they sell it for?: Free
• Did they provide Value: Not everyone understood the business model, many tried to build the businesses, copy & paste, cheap copies with no sustainable advantage. That is why saw the internet bubble burst, valuations dip, killing a lot of the useless models in the process
• What did they need to store?: Primarily information, in a very reliable model, and made available to users easily and without much delay
• Where could they store?: All they needed was space for servers and connectivity to users.

Imagine a company that can sell products without any retail outlets, (like many e-commerce companies today), all they need is a warehouse. If the product is information, all you need is a data warehouse.

As the place of selling was the internet and was disaggregated from users location (no radius of coverage), they started to grow very fast, in fact, the growth was more than exponential, that is why use “web-scale”. This inevitably led to the creation of data warehouses.

And that triggered many more changes. so far we have seen the disaggregation of services from network and services from the location.

Next week, we will see what more changes were triggered as the data warehouse came into being.

So stay tuned.