yes - it is all about BIG DATA and CLOUD these days. We are doing big data specifically in the area of pharma research since many years with our customers. Using highly sizable cloud infrastructure for data provided by external parties makes a lot of sense and will help us to reduce data loading times from days to hours.

An architecture in this new area needs to be able to replace any component very fast - the market is new, very dynamic and new vendors come up with new interesting approaches. So this is a kind of agile DWH/BI environment for big data. By transporting some of our custom built frontends into the cloud we might be able to shield the users from some of these dynamics.