1. An intelligent storage controller comprising: at least one non-volatile physical storage device under the control of the intelligent storage controller; an operating system; logic to provide storage management for the at least one non-volatile physical storage device; a communications connection configured to receive commands from an external device; embedded data transformation software to perform one or more data transformation operations on data residing on the at least one non-volatile physical storage device without transferring the data to the external device, the data transformation operations comprising one of data format conversion, data sorting, data summing, data averaging, data sampling, data compression, data decompression, data encoding, or data decoding; software installable as a service on the intelligent storage controller to: listen on the communications connection for commands from an external device specifying data transformations to be performed; pass the commands to the data transformation software; and send result codes returned from execution of the commands back to the external device.