Big Data Now: 2012 Edition by O’Reilly Media Inc

Author:O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: COMPUTERS / Data Processing
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Published: 2012-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

So go forth and create beautiful stories, my statistical friends. See you after peer-review.

The Chicken and Egg of Big Data Solutions

By Jim Stogdill

Before I came to O’Reilly I was building the “big data and disruptive analytics practice” at a major systems integrator. It was a blast to spend every week talking to customers in different industries who were waking up to the possibilities that technologies like Hadoop offered their businesses. Many of these businesses are going to fundamentally change as they embrace this stuff (or be replaced by those that do). But there’s a catch.

Twenty years or so ago large integrators made big business building applications on the then-new relational paradigm. They put in Oracle databases with custom code, wrote PowerBuilder apps on Sybase, and of course lots of businesses rolled their own with VB and SQL Server. It was an era of custom coding where Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix and etc. were thought of as platforms to build stuff on.

Then the market matured and shifted to package solution implementation. ERP, CRM,…, etc. The big guys focused on integrating again and told their clients there was no ROI in building custom stuff. ROI would come from integrating best-of-breed solutions. Databases became commodity back ends to the applications that were always the real focus.

Now along comes big data, NoSQL, data science, and all that stuff and it seems like we’re starting the cycle over again. But this time clients, having been well trained over the last decade or so, aren’t having any of that “build it from scratch” mentality. They know that Hadoop and other new technologies can be transformative to their business, but they want it packaged up and solution’ified like they are used to. I heard a lot of “let us know when you have a solution already built or available to buy that does X” in the last year.

Also, lots of the shops that do this stuff at scale are built and staffed around the package implementation model and have shed many of the skills they used to have for custom work. Everything from staffing models to methodologies are oriented toward package installation.

So, here we are with all of this disruptive technology, but we seem to have lost the institutional wherewithal to do anything with it in a lot of large companies. Of course that fact was hard on my numbers. I had a great pipeline of companies with pain to solve, and great technologies to solve it, but too much of the time it was hard to close it without readymade solutions.

Every week I talked to the companies building these new platforms to share leads and talk about their direction. After a while I started cutting them off when they wanted to talk about the features of their next release. I just got to the point where I didn’t really care, it just wasn’t all that relevant to my customers. I mean, it’s important that they are making the platforms more manageable and building bridges to traditional BI, ETL, RDBMS, and the like.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.