DataWeek 2012 Conference, the largest six-day conference held in San Francisco, California was focused on big data with good blends of panels, speakers, labs, and great new tools on the management of data. The event was an opportunity to learn, and also to compare experiences and exchange ideas with the various stakeholders.
All workshops offered by the various organizers were around the visualization of data, social data, big data or data mobility. Featured speakers included Jay Parikh, VP of Infrastructure at Facebook; Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera; Ping Li, partner at Accel; and Rob High, CTO of IBM Watson. CloudTimes was a proud sponsor of this largest ever big data show.
Innovative Big Data Tools
Vitria was honored for its KPI Application Builder, the first application intelligence operations around the world, which allows continuous perspectives on the key performance indicators of an organization in minutes to share views and act upon the information.
The Operational Intelligence enables real-time perspectives in areas such as Big Data, events and complex business processes. The Operational Intelligence applications are lightweight and easily configurable web that provide insights based on continuous analysis of multiple data sources, both static and in motion.
Software AG announced that its flagship product “Terracotta BigMemory”, a wholly owned subsidiary, was awarded the 2012 DataWeek Top Innovator Award in the best “Big Data Technology” category.
Terracotta BigMemory distinguished itself in the world of big solutions in-memory data management for driving innovation in data management. The platform can manage terabytes of data and thousands of users at once accessing structured and semi-structured data in real-time.
Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, and Ping Li, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners discussed about the big data challenges and opportunities for startups and young companies. They shared that Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and other emerging open source big data platforms are quickly evolving and more new applications are expected to reach consumers on top of these platforms.
Both the leaders also shared that there is a need for more business intelligence, new analytics and data visualization tools because stats platforms like SAS and R for predictive analytics were not built for the big data world. Tableau Software has been wildly successful, but it was built before big data tools were even around.
Facebook is building real-time processing, graph analysis, data visualization and other analytics tools with open source projects like Memcached, MySQL and Hadoop. The company runs the largest Hadoop deployment in the world, with more than 100 petabytes of information.
Precog, the startup developer of infrastructure for data warehousing and analysis, offered platform-as-a-service solution. The company’s big data solutions are designed for developers and data scientists, and combine the scalability of big data platforms with the number-crunching power of statistical tools. By simplifying big data capture, storage and analysis through cloud APIs, developers can build highly sophisticated big data and analysis features into their Applications.
Precog is designed for capturing event-oriented data, such as behavioral interaction records, transactional records, historical aggregates, individual sensor measurements or any data set stored in traditional relational database management system (RDBMS).
Big Data Analytics
Al Shipp, CEO of leading video intelligence company 3VR shared how video intelligence tied to big data analytics cloud be a game changer for companies. He said industries from retail to banking to crime prevention can transform the consumer experience through video intelligence solutions. For example, retail store system can now provide products based on a buyer’s interests on images captured, or hotel staff can greet guests by names or know their preferences even before they walk into the hotel.
“In the universe of big data, everyone is talking about structured data, and a few are talking about unstructured data but no one is talking about how unstructured data can be really leveraged. Video data has the lion’s share in big data, is unstructured data, and is in front of us. It is the elephant in the room that gets bigger every day,” said Shipp. “Companies can harness all of this unstructured data for making smarter business decisions.”
Zillow, the data and analytics specialist for homes buyers, currently claims over a 30 million unique users per month by analyzing data through a database of over 100 million homes. The company offers wide range of analyses and reports featuring foreclosure rates, neighborhood values, and the projected cost of renting vs. buying.
