By now, we've all heard the estimate that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected. Some estimates are higher, some lower, but we can all agree...it's a lot. What we know and can see is that more data is being generated today than ever before. And the nature of the data is changing. It's getting warmer and more active. What do I mean by "active data?"

Business intelligence, as we once knew it, meant collecting data and warehousing it away for reporting through the rear view mirror. Now data is moving from stack to flow, being streamed and analyzed for decision making in real time. Video surveillance used to mean collecting and storing terabytes of footage; now it means facial recognition and motion event triggers. Patient records aren't just being digitized and stored. Diagnostic imaging data is being analyzed in real time for faster and better outcomes. And where we used to store massive amounts of data from sensors and connected devices -scanning and sifting for patterns and problems, we're now seeing machine learning being applied to accelerate nearly every industry.

It's no longer about simply accumulating data but constantly analyzing it, transforming it, creating value with it in new ways.

This is active data.

Yet we know that the vast majority of data is collected to only go dormant. It is a data management challenge, but it's also a data center challenge because analyzing data at this scale and tempo was impossible to do in an affordable way. As technology is evolving -think just of what Hadoop has allowed -it is becoming easier for our customers to analyze massive amounts of data on x86 platforms. But "unstoring" and activating all this data requires a powerful, agile computing platform.

A modern platform to process active data needs to scale as effortlessly as the cloud, integrate IT with developers through the tools they want to use, and provide the fabric that becomes the backplane of these distributed systems. That modern platform is UCS. Now it's even more powerful with our new S-Series: an exclusive class of storage-dense, modular computing designed to give our our customers what they need to power digital transformation.

This week I'm delighted to be at our World Wide Partner Summit to announce this new addition to the UCS family. I'll be joined by our ISV and channel partners who come together with us to deliver all the solutions our customers need in a world of active data. Tune in to our Data Center blog, our webcast, and join the conversation with the team to learn more about S-Series and all the joint solutions we're developing around this exciting new platform.