Day 2 of the O’Reilly Strata Conference is starting here in Santa Clara, California and the focus is very much on data. In 2005, Tim O’Reilly predicted: “Data is the Next Intel Inside.” At VMware, big, fast data has never been so critical for our customers and innovations are transforming the cloud applications landscape at an unprecedented rate. This conference comes at the perfect time to reset what everyone knows about big, fast data.
The conference kicked off yesterday with several brief 20 minute keynotes. They were all succinct and to the point. Greenplum‘s Scott Yara reflected on how the big data market has grown tremendously over the past few years and mentioned several key data scientist practitioners. Scott also mentioned the increased investment in open source Hadoop. Of course, Strata comes on the heels of the Greenplum Pivotal HD announcement on Monday which launched their distribution of Hadoop which can improve performance 50X to 500X when compared to existing SQL-like services on top of Hadoop.
Another great keynote presentation was from Yael Garten, a Senior Data Scientist from LinkedIn. Yael leads the mobile data analytics team. She began by polling the audience and noting that many in the audience had already been on 3 different devices that morning and it wasn’t even 9:30 am yet. She noted we’re constantly connected, and we need to use data to personalize the experience for users no matter what device we’re on. She had an interesting graph highlighting device use and laptop use during our morning time of “coffee to couch”. And those uses are different in the US compared to places like India. Continue reading