In this special guest feature, Sundeep Sanghavi, explains why attending the upcoming Strata + Hadoop World Conference is important – Oct. 15-17, 2014 in NYC. Sundeep Sanghavi is the CEO and Co-Founder of DataRPM. DataRPM is an award-winning, industry pioneer in smart machine analytics for big data. DataRPM will be attending the Strata + Hadoop World conference this year; stop by booth P22 and get a chance to win a trip to London, including a private Sherlock Holmes tour.
Big data is making big buzz these days, but there are times when it seems like that’s about all it’s making. For some, the concrete financial benefits may not have yet lived up to the hype.
Partly, that’s been a problem of messaging. It’s so obvious to people immersed in the industry that big data is going to change the world—and already is, really—that the industry has perhaps been guilty of overselling what’s actually possible now. And then, when there really are important advances in capacity and scaling, there hasn’t been nearly a good enough job done of communicating that to a general audience.
The result is a sad and ultimately distorted misconception that big data is an esoteric pipe-dream or a privilege only available to the biggest, richest, and most tech-savvy companies.
However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The new Big Data paradigm, as it were, is made up of two parallel trends in society. The first is the gradual quantification of everyday life. The second is the exponential growth of computing power.
The world, in other words, is slowly becoming a massive data set, and computing technology, in turn, has grown more and more powerful in order to accommodate it.
What you’re seeing now in the industry, then, is a new focus on compartmentalizing the available information. Even as fundamental tools like Hadoop, Cassandra, Storm, Spark/Shark, and DrillPublic, extend the broader possibilities further and further, smaller, more specialized services have emerged to deliver usable insights for businesses, governments, and organizations in general.
There’s no better place to understand this dual phenomenon than at the Strata + Hadoop World conference, where invited speakers include Stanford and Berkeley professors, historians, journalists, startup CTOs, and corporate executives, and names represented in the attendance run the gamut from Thompson Reuters, Adobe, Google, Facebook, Chevron, Bank of America, Verizon, Skype, the Department of Defense, Netflix, LinkedIn, Dupont, Nielsen, Apple, Etrade, Paypal, Orbitz, Stanford University, the National Academy of Science, Dow Jones, and dozens of other dynamic, small-to-medium-sized services now doing much of the leg work facilitating all those big enterprise insights.
A lot of the talk this year at the conference, which has become a representative weather-vane for the industry as a whole, will center around this new inward-facing direction of big data technologies. There’s a recognition now among even the big players that the true growth of the industry lies in populating the city, as it were. The advent of natural language software and machine learning frameworks has already started to reduce HR demands on end users, making big data capability an affordable tool even on a small-business budget. Big data is starting to be able to deliver the immediately relevant, actionable solutions the general audience has always expected.
On the meta level, recent IDC report predicts big data, as an industry, will experience 27% compounded annual growth, skyrocketing to $32.4 billion globally by 2017. According to O’Reilly’s own statistics, data science job posts have already jumped 89% year-over-year, with data engineering openings up 38%.
But a better illustration of the patterns we’ve been talking about comes from Gartner, which recently placed “advanced, pervasive, invisible analytics” at #4 on its list of top strategic IT trends for 2015. Mobile computing devices, the research firm explains, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, as are built-in analytics in the mobile apps these devices offer. Going back to our metaphor, as apps collect mass data on previously unmonitored behavior, new grid space is integrated into our city. Similarly, the more data becomes available on old functions, the higher the buildings get—and the more impactful, more precise the insights become. In addition, Gartner noted that the era of the smart machine is upon us, and predicted that it will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.
When you look at the makeup of Strata + Hadoop World and the conference schedule, it’s easy to understand just how powerful this industry shift is across the industry spectrum. You’ve got broad-stroke presentations for laymen executives next to hyper-specific coding demonstrations for tech buffs, panel discussions with insiders, outsiders, and experts from across the enterprise spectrum, sponsorships that put megalithic data-miners next to the specialized software services making their information usable.
Big data is learning to look small, and that’s going to be huge for everyone. For the reasons above, we believe the Strata + Hadoop World conference is worth taking note of.
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