Architecting for the mobile market

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Business in India is on the move - quite literally. Mobility has reshaped business paradigms (particularly B2C) almost unrecognisably from even a decade ago. The reason? Indian consumers have an affinity for smartphones that is second to almost none. Almost a year ahead of predictions, India recently overtook the US to become the second largest market for smartphones. A 15 percent growth in Q4 2015 expanded the smartphone user base in India to 220 million. And that still leaves more than 3/4th of the market untapped, because according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), the number of mobile subscribers has crossed 1 billion, a ten-fold increase in the last 15 years.

Globally, and particularly in India, it was a perfect storm of technology that resulted in this era of mobile disruption. Rapid advances in hardware, software and connectivity brought about this revolution; in particular, the advances in flash memory technology played an important role. A compact and robust form factor, no moving parts, and energy efficiency made flash the ideal choice for mobile devices. Since those early days, the flash industry has continued to innovate tirelessly and mobile devices get sleeker, smarter and more powerful every year. Smartphone users today carry in their pockets the computing power and connectivity of laptops from a few years ago. And they put that power to good use.

Smartphones choreograph our lives today; we use them to manage almost all aspects of our lives, personal and professional, thanks to the countless innovative apps available for almost any service or convenience. We expect commerce to be conducted 24/7 in a manner of our choosing, and a company that turns away customers with a “closed for business now” sign can expect to lose them.

For example, a year ago, a leading online fashion portal decided to switch to an app-only model based on the fact that 70 percent of its revenue was coming from mobile customers. But forcing customers to install their app on their phones backfired and the company saw a dip in traffic and sales. As a course correction, the fashion retailer brought back its mobile site, giving their customers more choice about the modality.

This goes to show that along with the significant challenges of handling a new business paradigm, this digital marketplace also offers immense potential. The digital marketplace today serves a largely mobile customer base and is anchored on the internet – or more specifically, on the Internet of Things (IoT). This rapidly expanding IoT – a network of intelligent objects (things) embedded with electronics and the ability to exchange information – is expected to connect 5.5 new things every day in 2016 and reach 20 billion connected entities by 2020. These interconnected things - computers, mobile devices, cameras, sensors, vehicles, Bluetooth beacons, wearables – make up the ecosystem of the digital marketplace. Vendors and service providers have to architect their IT platforms to be able to converse intelligently on the IoT so they can buy, sell and manage other business functions. They must manage and process the vast amounts of data generated by the IoT and extract actionable intelligence on which to base or tweak their marketing strategy. For example, based on location, intelligence for a particular mobile customer, restaurant aggregator portals offer timely discount coupon for restaurants in the vicinity. And if fitness tracking data for that same mobile customer can be cross-referenced, data analytics may indicate that the customer is more likely to choose restaurants offering light and healthy fare.

As companies figure out their business models in this disruptive digital world, there is one technology that involves no conjecture – flash storage. Flash technology has continued to evolve to keep pace with changing demands. And its use is not just in the end points like smartphones, but at all strategic points across the IoT: End points, edge points, data centres, cloud. The versatility of flash storage solutions in terms of capacity, performance and form factor make it the ideal choice across the network.

End points In addition to smartphones and traditional computing devices, there many other smart IoT end points that use flash: Wearables, including those for health and activity monitoring (e.g. glucometers, Fitbit, Google Glass), home and automotive sensors and electronics for lighting and temperature control, GPS, Bluetooth smart beacons in retail spaces, sensors for weather, water and air quality sensors for use in agriculture and city management, etc. These are just a few examples in a wide range of endpoints used for personal, industrial and civic applications.

Edge points
As the network expands rapidly outwards, a centralised approach to handle the massive data deluge is impractical. Instead a distributed network of intelligent edge points helps take the pressure off the central node and helps set up a fail-safe system. These edge clusters serve as clearing houses for data from the end points, sending forth a filtered and streamlined data set to the central node, thereby reducing transmission load, latency and improving the quality of service. High performance flash storage provides the input/output speed (IOPS) that is vital for this type of computing.

Central nodes
The brain of a company’s IT infrastructure is its datacentre – the repository of all the business intelligence and data. Datacentres can take different forms: On-premise, cloud-based or a hybrid of the two. Flash storage plays an important role in all these configurations. The latest flash offerings for big data provide high-performance, high capacity and compact storage (up to 512 terabytes in a 3U enclosure) with low maintenance costs and a wide range of configurations and capacities that can be mixed and matched and retrofitted into existing systems. Combined with software-defined storage, flash solutions provide users the ability to easily and remotely manage and provision a mix of different underlying hardware.

This goes to show that despite starting small, today flash is ubiquitous and versatile enough for all forms of storage needs. Indeed, it is the disruptive technology that can help customers manage and crest every wave of disruption that the digital world flings their way.

(This article expresses the views of the author and not necessarily that of his employer.)

- By Vivek Tyagi, Director for India business development, SanDisk Commercial sales and Support at Western Digital Corporation

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.