The fundamentals in our industry are pretty simple. We have data that we care about, we do compute to it, and we send and receive it over a network; that’s all we do. - Jason Hoffman, GigaOm Structure, 2013

At a basic level, our industry deals with three fundamentals: Network, compute, and data. While those fundamentals are simple, the quantity of data we’re now dealing with requires that these fundamentals come together in new ways. This convergence, and how it will impact our relation to big data, was the subject of Jason Hoffman’s talk at GigaOm Structure this week, “What We Have is Not Good Enough: Connecting the Numbers.” He explained that Internet and PC industries grew out of the convergence of network and compute. Network storage is a result of the data and network convergence.

The big question that should be on everyone’s mind is: What will happen when compute and data begin to converge?

As we all know, even the simplest of projects can result in massive amounts of data. In past few years, we’ve started to realize how valuable that data can be. The problem is, we’re now at the point that data collection is limited by the capacity of storage available. The solution to that problem is rethinking those three fundamentals - and the potential in their correlations.

When we do that, we’ll see how democratized access to the product has potential to disrupt global profits over the span of the next 30 years.

You can watch Jason’s talk, or read a transcript, by checking out this GigaOm article, “The Convergence of Data and Computer Will Disrupt Global Profits.”