Here’s a piece of acronym-jargon that’s been in heavy use over the past 2-3 years – SMAC, or Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud. While in itself the term reeks of vague generalization, the underlying concept is quite noteworthy.
SMAC encapsulates four major components of the data management ecosystem from a business’ point of view. Social & Mobile are the points of interaction,
while Analytics and Cloud are leveraged from the backend to gain meaningful insights and support digital infrastructure requirements.
Social presence and mobile interactions result in the creation of massive amounts of data – structured and unstructured. Both these fields have caused massive disruption in the way we interact with consumers, and have increased one-on-one and communal engagement with our various stakeholders.
The massive amounts of data generated from these interactions need to be adequately handled; else they simply result in useless clutter. That’s where Analytics & Cloud comes in.
Big Data solutions like Hadoop, QlikView, Tableau and MapReduce allow businesses to actually manage data warehousing, data distribution, data processing and Analytics. When dealing with such copious amounts of data, cloud-based infrastructure is usually preferred to traditional on-site datacenters due to scalability limitations and cost inefficiencies.
On-demand infrastructure like Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other similar Cloud offerings are usually preferred to host Big Data & Business Analytics solutions.
To sum up the ecosystem:
- Social Networks & Mobile Devices generate massive amounts of data via audience engagement
- To process all this data – a lot of which is raw and unstructured – businesses need to provision scalable solutions
- Big Data Analytics & Business Intelligence software needs to be hosted on robust Cloud-based infrastructure that can match data storage and processing power requirements
- Data is processed into meaningful information from which myriad insights can be gained and business processes optimized
We hope this article negates some of the vagueness associated with the term SMAC and helps you understand the roles of each component!
