A character in the upcoming book I am co-authoring titled The AI Analyst (due in November) says
“Patrick, did you know I was in the Service? Spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East. I used to hear the expression often, ‘Who put OUR oil under THEIR sand?’ Sounded funny most of the time. Idle talk, but sometimes it sounded ominously hostile. We are going through something similar in the technology world: ‘Who put OUR data in THEIR data centers?’ There is zero respect for customer data. There’s a land grab happening.”
Our book is in the fiction, thriller genre, but I am already seeing it in the real world. Corporations have unique customer, product and operational data and related domain expertise. Most vendors have plenty of data and domain expertise, but it is usually not that unique – it tends to be back office, horizontal, country specific. Essential data, but not at premium commanding prices.
There is plenty of unique customer data which will likely never find its way into a vendor cloud – seismic survey data at oil companies, drug molecular data at pharma companies, pixel metadata at satellite imagery companies and plenty more. And even mundane IoT, patent detail, medical records, customer contract data is elusive – as it should be for privacy and IP protection reasons.
And when vendors have useful data, they tend to be very protective and put all kinds of restrictions if other vendors try to access it. A BI vendor recently recounted the issues they face when their tools try to access customer data in other vendor’s databases. They only get access to high level, summarized data. The other vendors have excuses like “you cannot understand the detailed data better than we do. So why do you want it in the first place?” It’s their customers data but they behave as if it theirs.
We are seeing a backlash from customers. You see the pendulum starting to swing from public clouds back to private clouds. Much of that is due to the economics of public clouds, or in some industries because they prefer capex v opex spend for their infrastructure, but increasingly the unspoken agenda is also to protect their unique data and the potential to monetize that on their own.
And you are seeing vendors trying to beg, borrow, steal unique customer data so they can feed their machines for differentiated AI use cases. That’s necessary, but not sufficient. They also need domain expertise talent to understand nuances in the data and to come up with compelling use cases.
You often hear the expression “Data is the new Oil”. Exploring for oil has always has always been high risk and required complex equipment and expensive engineering talent. The same is happening around differentiated data. Wars will be fought in the quest for such data. We are at the beginning, idle envy stages. But as we have seen with consumer data, there will be much uglier behavior by rogue vendors.
“Who put our oil under their sand?” - in a few weeks you will be able to read more about that character and about criminal behavior in the tech sector in our fiction book.
