• Google introduces its 'Big Lake' data storage engine
• IDC declares the enterprise journey to the edge well underway
• Rakuten Group revs up its circular economy app and platform

At its Cloud Data Summit Google has been talking about Google Cloud’s  ‘Big Lake’:  its new  data lake storage engine which it claims eases the ability of enterprises to analyse data in their data warehouses. Data analytics is arguably Google’s big USP as it battles its rivals for a bigger share of the cloud market, including of course, the telco cloud market, which is one of the key battlegrounds.  Clearly Google has oodles of experience in this general area and through BigLake it claims an approach that will give developers access to a uniform storage engine which can be queried through a single system and has abstracted away the underlying storage formats so users don’t need to duplicate data to get at it.   

From the data lake to the edge…  IDC says the enterprise journey to the edge is already  well underway (for many organisations) as they “seek to connect with customers in new ways, improve operational efficiency, and adopt digital technologies to support innovation.”  The research outfit says that three quarters of organisations plan to increase their edge spending over the next two years with an average increase of 37%. Why? A combo of factors: expanding workloads; new use cases that use AI and machine learning (ML) and require compute capacity at the edge. Overall though, it notes that the amount of data being stored in edge locations is rapidly expanding, and organisations are keeping it there longer. As a result, the number of physical servers being deployed at the edge is rising. Most of this investment prioritises the modernization of existing infrastructure in edge locations as opposed to building out new infrastructure, it claims.  Other key findings include: Organisations want to integrate edge solutions with legacy infrastructure and regard this ability as just as important as price when making edge decisions. However, IDC points out that edge management strategies are often not tightly integrated with cloud and core, suggesting that organisations may need to revise their management strategies as they seek to leverage core, cloud, and edge resources as a cohesive set of flexible resources. The IDC  research is available through  IDC EdgeView  service.

Rakuten Group, Inc., operator of the consumer e-commerce app “Rakuten Rakuma,” is planning to turn that e-commerce app into a fully fledged “circular economy” platform and it’s displaying its determination by redesigning its logo and app icon as proof. Actually, it does appear to be taking some concrete steps in the right sustainable direction by announcing the full-scale launch of Rakuma Official Shops, which showcases more than 130 ‘reuse’ businesses and 40 domestic parallel import businesses operating on the platform, as well as Direct from the Farm/Specialised Food Products Stores, which specialise in transactions involving agricultural and fishery products.These businesses deal in  a wide variety of products, such as professionally-inspected second-hand brand products and smartphones, in addition to ‘Direct from the Farm’/Specialised Food Products Stores, food producers, manufacturers and distributors that can sell specialised products such as agricultural goods and fishery products. Rakuten Rakuma says it’s committed to providing a platform that contributes to the creation of a circular economy, centred on second-hand goods and “responsible consumption”. Read more…