Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. We are super glad to receive all the amazing feedback you have been sending us and we are going through all the suggestions you send as well. One suggestion we got was to talk more about the metaverse. Now, the metaverse is such a happening buzzword right now, everybody seems to be talking about it. Some of us know what it is, and some of us have been an active part of it, but there are a lot of us who would like to know more. Metaverse is indeed a very concept and it is evolving pretty quickly that the more you learn, there more there is to learn. So, we decided let us introduce all our listeners to the concept of the multiverse while shedding some light on its connection to a technology that we do know something about and seem to understand a bit – cloud computing. So, without further ado, let’s begin!
Let us start with the million-dollar question everybody is already asking – What is the Metaverse?
Mark Zuckerberg is talking about it, Satya Nadella is talking about it, and the tech houses are calling the Metaverse the future of the internet. But what is the Metaverse, really?
Kristi Woolsey, the associate director at BCG Plantinion, as reported by the Forbes magazine, says that the metaverse is a term that is used to describe a combination of the virtual reality and mixed reality worlds that can be accessed through a browser or a headset which would let people have real-time interactions and experiences across distances. She goes on to say that the current increase in attention to the metaverse is partly driven by the very recent ability to fully ‘own’ virtual objects experiences, or even land. Thanks to Blockchain, you could now define a virtual object and buy it and sell it. This has created new economies where everything is taking place virtually. Now, we understand, that a lot of you feel that paying real money for a virtual piece of land or a virtual object is a super crazy idea, but to put it into perspective, until many years back, purchasing domain names was also considered to be a very crazy idea – it was also a virtual piece of real estate of sorts. And today, purchasing domain names is no longer a crazy idea, it is a necessity.
According to the Bloomberg business analysis 2021, the metaverse could potentially unlock a nearly $800 billion market opportunity! Now, that’s a humongous amount, isn’t it?
So, how is the metaverse related to cloud computing? Well, it won’t be an overstatement to say that the metaverse would be a boon for cloud computing. The metaverse would generate unimaginably large amounts of data and information that would require unimaginably large amounts of reliable and secure storage and processing power to seamlessly support a gigantic virtual reality universe. The metaverse would require ever-better performance and attention to detail is, of course, critical. And what technology facilitates this better than cloud computing? Moreover, the cloud can grow and scale as the metaverse grows and scales.
It is predicted that the future will see manifold growth in metaverse providers. It is likely that while there could be a few big players, the market does have space for everyone and there would be many, many metaverse providers. As more and more tech investors realize the potential of the metaverse, there will not just be a growth in the number of providers but also more and more investors wanting a piece of the pie, so to speak. Now, quite a lot of these metaverse providers would be built using private data centers, some might even be built with managed service providers. However, these would be few and far between, most likely. A large majority of metaverse providers being highly compute- and graphics-intensive systems would be built on public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. One of the key features of cloud computing is that it offers on-demand computing and storage on an easy and convenient pay-as-you-go model. This makes it one of the major USPs of cloud computing. This would continue in the metaverse too. This ease, convenience, and paying for only what you use would make cloud computing incredibly attractive for metaverse providers and creators. To top it, virtual reality has been a part of the cloud computing world anyway for many years now offering training simulators and a range of other teaching methods.
Now here is the more important question. If you are a cloud computing professional or are aspiring to be a cloud computing professional, what would the metaverse do for you? How will it affect your career? What can you do to ride the wave and make the most of this new technology?
Well, the first and foremost thing to do is – learn, learn, and learn some more. Keep digging more and more about what the metaverse is, what virtual reality is, what augmented reality is, what mixed reality is, what all these technologies do, and how are they changing the world as you know it. These are new emerging technologies and there is still no widespread understanding of them. When you understand the metaverse better than others, you happen to become a unicorn who just brightened your career prospects manifold. Learn about how you can build systems for these technologies. A lot of major public cloud platforms offer VR development system packages that can help you learn some techniques and acquire some valuable skills in the field.
The next thing you can do is explore the business value of these developments. The metaverse can be a social movement or an experiential platform, but until it offers monetary value, there is no business sense in it. So, build business use cases around it. For instance, the blockchain has been around for so long, but it caught worldwide attention after people began realizing its business value for it. You should be thoroughly informed and prepared to be able to talk about how a business can realize value by embracing the metaverse.
The third area you can explore is to understand how the current business systems can be developed and deployed inside the metaverse. For instance, how can an enterprise deploy its business analytics capabilities inside the metaverse? How can you build supply chain value by introducing it to the metaverse? If you can find answers to questions you like this, allow us to tell you, that you’ve hit the jackpot.
To cut a long story short, the metaverse is a very, very new concept in the very initial stages of development, and there is a very, very long way it has to go, or before it even becomes mainstream. But, if you want to stand out from the crowd, future-proof your career, or be different and do something different, it is time to start keeping the metaverse in mind. Early birds do catch the worm, right? So, while you work on growing and upgrading your current in the real world, maybe start planning to leap to the metaverse when the time comes? And to do that, your time to prepare starts now.
With that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We hope you liked the episode. Do tell us what you think, we would love to know. Also, as we mentioned, if you are an aspiring cloud computing professional or already a cloud computing professional and would like to gain new skills or validate your skills with a certification, talk to us today to know more about our live online instructor-led training and certifications. We are a Microsoft Silver Partner offering the complete portfolio of the Microsoft Certification courses. So, talk to us today, drop us an email, give us a call, talk to us in the chat window on our website, drop us a DM on any of our social media handles, or just leave a comment here and we would be happy to guide you about which course would be the perfect fit for you and how you can prepare to take the next step in your career.
Until next week then, happy learning!
