17 New Big Data Things To Talk About Since Strata 2013

Strata is all about the future of big data and data science—exactly the same reasons we formed Pivotal to solve. So it makes sense that this year, Pivotal is an Elite sponsor. While it may be our first time here as a stand-alone company, many Pivots have been here before as part of VMware or EMC. This year will be decidedly different for us though. Since the last Strata conference, we have been very, very busy spinning out, innovating and solving big data and data science challenges around the globe.

For a taste of what we’ve been up to, see the list below. For the full low down, come see us at Strata!

To Find Us at Strata 2014—Feb 11-13 in Santa Clara

You can find us whenever the show floor is open at booth #201. However, Thursday is our big day for speaking. We will start at 9 am with a keynote on building the digital brain. Then at 10:40 am, one of our customers, Kaiser Permanente, is on a panel with our partners from NYSE and Capgemini. Together, they will discuss the “Business Data Lake” and how infrastructure is evolving. Finally at 4 pm, several of our top data scientists are presenting about the future of smart cities, driving, and traffic.

What’s Happened with Pivotal Since Strata 2013 in Santa Clara

1. We made a big announcement about Pivotal HD and HAWQ in February and showcased the product’s tremendous gains in productivity, including a case study showing the ability to run SQL 100x faster on Hadoop. Later in the year, a retail customer came forward showing how they were actually able to run SQL 318x faster.
2. Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0 also went GA in February, making it easier than ever to include Hadoop into your Java applications.
3. In April, Pivotal spun out of VMware and EMC with a $105 million investment from GE and announced our Pivotal One PaaS that is aimed straight at accelerating how enterprises spin up big data applications on any cloud.
4. April also kicked off Spring XD, the first in a series of ‘XD’ (think eXtra-large Data) projects we cooked up to bring Hadoop data into applications more in real-time, making data infinitely more actionable.
5. As predicted, everyone saw Hadoop dominate technology media in 2013. It is also a year where many companies demonstrated actual results with big data projects, and companies like GE shared 14 new industrial internet types of big data applications that will boost GDP by $10-15 B TRILLION.
6. In June, our engineering team launched the Pivotal Analytics Workbench, a 1000-node, publicly available Hadoop cluster with free access. We also provided downloads of Pivotal HD Community and Pivotal HD Single Node that could be set up in 45 minutes.
7. In September, Pivotal GemFire was also previewed at SpringOne 2GX with a two-way integration to Hadoop.
8. Our data science team shared methods to run large-scale video analytics on Hadoop and MapReduce for distributed video transcoding, some of our most popular blog posts in 2013.
9. In October, we announced another XD project—Pivotal GemFire XD which dramatically improves big data ingest speeds, bringing real-time, in-memory data access to a Pivotal HD environment.
10. October also marked one of our first global investments in accelerating Big Data, where we created the first Pivotal Innovation Centre by partnering with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), aimed at helping Asian companies tackle big data problems today. Later in December, we announced a 10 year investment in Tech City UK, aimed at helping the London tech community to become the next Silicon Valley, using our big data tech as an accelerator.
11. Our biggest story of October, however was acquiring Xtreme Labs. Often called the Pivotal Labs of Mobile, this acquisition was an easy fit, and rounded out our big data strategy by placing mobile as a key theme across every big data application project.
12. In November, after just 7 months in business, Pivotal One launched and included the commercial version of Cloud Foundry, Pivotal CF, and Pivotal One services, including Hadoop as a service in the form of Pivotal HD.
13. Next in November, we launched Spring Reactor out of incubation. This project will help any application using a JVM to process data at speeds of up to 15 million asynchronous transactions a second, something vital to today’s big data applications, especially those surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT).
14. In December we announced that one of the early Hadoop committers and founder of Apache Big Top, Roman Shaposhnik joined Pivotal’s engineering team, leaving his past at Yahoo! and Cloudera behind him and looking to the future where he is betting, “Pivotal is an ideal sponsor for an effort to bring us closer to the fully integrated, easy to use Hadoop platform.”
15. The whole year built massive momentum around Pivotal, ending in some impressive media coverage in December, where Forrester said, “Pivotal could catapult over other EDW (enterprise data warehouse) solutions” and The Economist ran a story that posited how Pivotal will be a bigger IT supplier to CIOs than Google and Apple in just a few years.
16. Throughout the whole year, we’ve been especially focused on sharing customer successes that inspire other companies to realize the possibilities of big data and analytics. We have lots of stories, but our most popular story to tell right now is how we helped transform the Chinese Railways to become one of the biggest success stories for this year’s Chinese New Year and Spring Festival, happening right now. More case studies can be found on our blog here.

Join us in Santa Clara, CA on February 11-13, 2014 for Strata 2014. You can use Pivotal20 as a 20% discount code when registering, and here is where you can find us:

• Pivotal will be hosting booth #201 as an Elite sponsor.
• Data Science Keynote @9AM on Thursday, 02/13/2014 by one of Pivotal’s top data scientists, Kaushik Das. The presentation will showcase data science in practice and build a digital brain. Examples will include collecting big data from a large number of sensors, storing information in a Data Lake, and applying data science methods with sophisticated machine learning and statistics to find value in the data.
• Panel on: The Business Data Lake: An Evolution in Data Infrastructure @10:40AM on Thursday, 02/13/2014. The panel will be moderated by Jeffrey Kelly of the Wikibon Project and include the Chief Data Office at NYSE, Group Director of Pivotal Technologies at Capgemini, and Director of Information & Analysis at Kaiser Permanente. They will discuss how organizations are moving beyond rigid and high latency data warehouse environments to more flexible and cost-effective Data Lakes—centrally managed repositories using low cost technologies such as Hadoop, SQL, In-Memory, and others to land any and all data that might potentially be valuable for analysis and operationalizing that insight.
• Presentation: Driving the Future of Smart Cities: How to Beat the Traffic @4:00PM on Thursday 02/13/2014. Three experts from Pivotal’s Data Science Team will share several innovative methods and predictive algorithms, demonstrate how they combined various machine learning methods and data sources, and show the results from analyzing traffic data via in-car sources like GPS as well as local weather, and more.