Panel on "Is Analytics the Killer App for Big Data"

TiE Silicon Valley hosted a panel on "Is Analytics the 'Killer App' for Big Data" on Wednesday, April 2, 2014.

The panel was moderated by IBM's Piyush Malik. Piyush started the meeting by setting the stage and providing context. Enterprises have been using analytical technique and statistical modeling for quite some time. A typical path has been  Reporting -> Discovery -> Analysis -> Alerting -> Forecasting -> Simulation ->Modeling -> Optimization -> Stochastic Optimization -> Cognitive Analytics.

The democratization of Data (due to the "Big Data" phenomenon) has allowed the application of analytics to take this leap forward. In the 1990s the data was on premise and technologies like Terradata were used to provide Descriptive Analytics. The cost for this was a prohibitive $1m / TB. In the 2000s, companies like Neteeza (acquired by IBM in 2010), Greenplum, asterData (acquired by Terradata in 2011) and Informatica used massively parallel architectures to bring this cost down to $100k / TB. Today, using Hadoop and Cassandra stacks with NoSQL and Cloud platforms, companies like MapR and Datastax and able to deliver Predictive Analytics moving towards Cognitive Analytics for a mere $1000 / TB.

While answering the question, "Why BigData?", Piyush said, "1 in 2 business leaders do not have access to the data that they need".

I was reminded of a talk (in the late 90s) by Bill Perry that I had attended (while I was at Sun Microsystems). He was recounting his experience when he was Secretary of Defense. He said that often times, he was asked to make decisions when he did not have all the required data. Yet, the impact of his decision could mean life or death for the soldier. "You have to trust your gut," he said. "Don't always lean towards what will make you 'popular'".

Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed Ventures spoke next. He spoke to LSVP's investments in MapR and Datastax affirming their commitment to BigData and the opportunity that the VC community saw in BigData.

Chris Jones, Director of Analytics at AAA was the next speaker. He spoke of his experiences as a consumer and producer of Big Data through his career that spanned Intuit, Adobe, Zynga and AAA.

Sai Devulapalli, Director of Analytics at Ericsson spoke about how they use BigData at Ericsson to make predictions about:

• Customers - Behavior, Experience, Churn
• Devices - Uptake, Performance, Failure
• Networks - Performance, Failure
• Campaigns - Uptake, Network Impact
• Services - Uptake, Performance, Failure, Network Impact

Janet George, Managing Director of Accenture Technology Labs spoke next. Previously, Janet worked at eBay and on Hadoop while at Yahoo. She spoke about life events for Small and Medium Businesses and the importance of data in the stages of Expansion, Consolidation and Change in Ownership.

The panel provided an overarching viewpoint on the impact of BigData in enterprises today. However, I felt that some of the bigger questions were left unanswered. No one was willing to talk about solving "Grand Challenge" problems. How about using Big Data to:

• Find a cure for Cancer
• Predict the next Earthquake
• Drug Discovery

If, at the end of the day, Enterprises are able to use "Big Data" to predict which brand of toothpaste I am likely to purchase next, we should be pooling our collective resources elsewhere.

TieCon 2011. Day 1 - May 13th.

It has been over two months since TieCon 2011 and I had been meaning to write this post for a long time. Unfortunately, numerous other activities took priority. I will publish this in two posts, Day 1 and Day 2.

Steve Case:

The Opening Keynote featured Steve Case, Co-founder of AOL and Chair of Startup America Partnership. Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes magazine hosted this keynote. Rich walked Steve through the initial days of AOL - until they were sold to Time Warner in 2000 when they had 200m users and a market cap of $150b. Big ideas, Steve said, take a decade or more to mature. In the first 25 years of the internet, the idea is to get every one online, mobile and make it ubiquitous. In the next 25 years, the Internet will transform and disrupt every aspect of life.

Rich then moved to what Steve was doing these days - which is lead startupamericapartnership.org. Here Steve's goal is to celebrate and accelerate entrepreneurship. He said that there are two models that investors adopt. One is the Kleiner Perkins approach of working with an "A" team that can successfully take a "B" product to market. The other is the Sequoia approach of looking for the next explosive new idea. In both cases execution is key - because, after all, as Thomas Edison said, "Vision without execution is Hallucination". When asked about his predictions for the next big hit, Steve stated that we are witnessing the early days of Local, Social Commerce. Healthcare, he said, will be transformed.

Rich asked Steve about the ability of Startups to survive the uncertain economic times that prevail these days. Steve said that similar conditions in the 1970s led to a very healthy entrepreneurial environment. FedEx, SouthWest Airlines, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are all companies founded in this turbulent decade.

Mobility Panel:

I attended the Enterprise Mobility panel that discussed how Enterprises will adopt Mobility. Matt Marshall, Venture Beat, was the moderator. The panel had two Enterprise folks: a VP from Cisco (Tom Gillis) and a VP from Sybase (Raj Nathan); a VC (Sumant Mandal, Clearstone Ventures) and an Entrepreneur (David Sacks, Yammer CEO). There was general consensus that mobile is a very hard place for investors to make money.

There was fierce debate was on whether to get into the Enterprise at the grass roots vs work your way from the top. The arguments in favor of working from the CIO down is to have a more controlled, predictable, deterministic way of deploying your solution. On the other hand, getting in at the grass roots will result in the pipeline getting filled by people using the free, viral product and cause IT to be "dragged in kicking and screaming". In the end, getting in at the grass root won the debate. It is invaluable to rely on their experience in using the product. It is important to create tools and technologies to put policies in place for these "un-managed" end points.

David Ferruci:

In the "Breakthrough Thinkers" session, David Ferruci, an IBM Fellow, gave one of the best keynotes I have heard in years. Dr. Ferruci is the lead researcher and Principal Investigator for IBM's Watson/Jeopardy! project. The keynote was replete with engineering insights into the Watson's Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA).

Vinod Khosla:

I was disappointed by Vinod Khosla's keynote. Perhaps I went in with very high expectations. He stated some very well known facts (on predictions that experts make) and arrived at some well understood conclusions (that these predictions are made by extrapolating past facts). He then went on to pitch ventures in which he has funded - on why they will succeed. Admittedly, some of them were accomplishing pretty lofty goals:

• Calera - sequestering Carbon dioxide
• Soraa - with 800% more efficient, pay for itself lighting
• Caitin - with new thermodynamic cycles for cooling

HP's Vision

Leo Apotheker took center stage yesterday for the first time since taking over as CEO of the World's largest technology company (by revenue) last November. Chris O'Brien (the business editor of the Mercury News) was not too impressed.

It seems to me that Leo Apotheker is able to put together a cohesive strategy around HP's vast portfolio. The fact that he dismissed the possible acquisition of SAP saying, "We don't need to own a big transactional application platform," says a lot about his focus.

There is a Software Advice blog post that mentions possible acquisitions by HP - with SAP leading the list. It would be interesting to see the results of their survey on when/who people think will be HP's next acquisition.

HP is poised to lead the technology universe into the world of cloud computing. Sun attempted to do that many years ago and failed. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and, now, HP are attempting to grab a piece of this pie. Sun's failure was in the execution of its vision. Often times, Sun tended to place the cart before the horse. That is, the execs would go up on stage and articulate a grandiose vision and then attempt to build the technologies towards that vision. HP, on the other hand, has been building up its portfolio of the various pieces in the puzzle. Yesterday, they finally came out and told us how they all fit together.

The next 6-12 months will tell us who comes out ahead in this battle that is being played out in the open. As a follow up to my earlier blog post (on HP vs Oracle), I think we are half time now and HP is leading by a touchdown.