Agreed. And attempting to treat them as such is only going to make things more complicated. Modern technology is not very friendly to silos because that same technology makes sharing information and data easier than ever.

And here’s another version of this integrated infrastructure: http://www.somoclo.com

The most important takeaway lesson is to not create new silos while creating solutions for this new era of technology.

We are just about to see our first major client launch a brand new service for motorcyclists that has been developed as a holistic service rather than a siloed suite of services. This approach truly delivers a new type of experience for users and a genuinely brand new business model – new revenue streams and a new level of user engagement that cannot be matched by the ‘social media campaign’ – which for the vast majority flatters to deceive.

I won’t give too much away – but watch this space – there is a new era of highly desirable services on the way and the winners will be those that heed Sanjay’s last paragraph.

While there is no doubt this is the future there are two issues we have found ourselves facing, so did our customers.
Firstly cloud infrastructure is still relatively expensive for what it offers. Amazon S3 is brilliant for sporadic computations but not really fit to maintain a large constantly-on infrastructure. Especially when you have to deal with large amounts of data that needs to be processed quickly, this require memory and big-memory virtual machines are still very expensive.
Additionally an issue faced by consumers more and more is the cost of connectivity from mobile devices, especially when roaming. roaming data charges are absurdly high. Talking with our users we found that what interests them at the moment is find a “smart” way to cache the data when a connection is not available, this is not the future, just a temporary remedy to the underlying issue Carriers not talking to each other and over-charging are slowing down the development of this industry for consumers.