Big Data or The Force? A Star Wars night at Data Driven night
NEW YORK–Would you rely on Big Data or The Force? It was a Star Wars evening for the Data-Driven meetup last December 14 at Bloomberg, especially for Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight who sounded giddy using the epic fantasy flick as reference for his presentation. He was joined by Arcadia Data, MapR and Datameer.
Gainsight offers a platform for teams to coordinate more efficiently, track business outcomes and streamline operations.
Because Methta considers data from four years ago to be entirely useless, he has some suggestions: “Focus on recent data (data quality), analyze by segment (data variance), understand models, track and automate actions and solve for leading metrics (data points),” addding how he focuses on helping customers get the right data.
Everybody was in a light mood at the meetup now with 10,000 members, now one of the biggest tech meetup groups. Even Shant Hovespian of Arcadia Data teased host Matt Turck for his uncanny resemblance to Ryan Seacrest, letting the 400 attendees a good look of the French man’s photo beside that of the TV and radio personality.
Arcadia Data builds Unified Visual Analytics and BI Platform for big data as its way of connecting business users to Hadoop. It unifies visual exploration and back-end data analytics in one integrated enterprise platform that runs natively on your Hadoop cluster.
It also converges the visual, analytics and data layers to provide accelerated access to all data stored within Hadoop, and support net-new analytics on granular datasets.
In creating business value from Big Data, Hovespian pointed out 10 commandments. These included “thou shalt not move Big Data; it’s expensive. It’s big….Push all the computation down close to the data.”
He added, “ODBC/JDBC connectors aren’t always enough but be careful having to extract data out to data marts & cubes.”
Having to extract data out of the system is slow and defeats the purpose of having a specialized architecture. On-cluster BI (business intelligence) is now possible.
The second commandment for him: “Thou shalt not steal or violate big data….“Security is serious. All the serious Big Data from vendors have implemented some form of security, your BI tool should support it,” he said.
A third commandment, “thou shalt not pay for every user or gigabyte,” asks for common sense. “Big data is cost effective if it’s used properly. Be wary of pricing models that penalize you for increased adoption.”
Other commandments for “analyzing thine data,” and “not waiting for results.” He said, ”Build an OLAP cube. Create temp tables. Take samples of the data.”
Overall, he suggests finding “the right balance if you’re dealing with several pain points.”
M.C. Srivas of MapR had a lot of interesting things to say. “How much data do self-driving cars produce? 1 terabytye per hour,” he said.
Srivas said it took him to two years to build MapR, which delivers business-critical production success using the MapR Converged Data Platform, 100 percent binary compatible with the Apahe Hadoop distributed file system to ensure plug-and-play compatibility and no vendor lock-in.
“Hire people not like you. Not from the same DNA,” he said.
A core module of the MapR Platform is MapR-GS, a modern, read-write capable, NFS-mountable distributed file system written in C++ that directly accesses storage hardware. It’s built to process both distributed files, database tables, and event streams in one unified layer This enables companies to support operational and analatic apps in one cluster, which can reduce costs as one grows big data deployment.
Stefan Groschupf of Datameer is lowering the barrier to big data analytics. The company aims to make it easy for everyone.
If it sounds intimidating, one can say the company sees big data as a way to end world hunger and solution to complex busness problems.
