Cloud Analytics Consortium presents: Analytics in the Cloud: Ready for Primetime

We do not want Big Data! We want the right data to answer the right questions!

Data is changing our world. Predictions using massive data not only have improved many products. At the same time, they have, in some industries, disrupted business models and created new ones.

What does an organization need to do to generate a new competitive advantage out of data? The answer might be surprising. “Change the state of mind.”

Companies often do not need big data. They essentially want small and actionable advice. Some predictions will need big data to surface relevant information, but not all. The key to success for many companies, however, is to enable “data­driven” decision making. Lutz will discuss the steps he has used in starting and developing his own company (later sold to WPP), as well as how he leads LinkedIn’s data science team.

A) Change the state of mind!
Enable everyone in the company to ask “data driven” questions. Lutz will show how this is the hardest part of the on­going exercise, but why most businesses actually can achieve this with their current strategic abilities. Using examples we will learn what is the best way to formulate the “Ask”.

B) What data?
Data can be a source of disruption & innovation. Business models change because new data sources and enhanced computational power allows new services or improve old services. But which data to use? Domain knowledge is often more important than having “Big Data". Lutz will introduce a framework on how to think about data.

C) How to build a Data Team?
How can organizations build up data capabilities within your team. Contrary to the common discussion that a data scientist are not ‘hard to find’. Lutz will explain how every company can create a data science organization by just mixing the right skillets.

When you hear someone say, “that is a nice infographic” or “check out this sweet dashboard,” many people infer that they are “well-designed.” Creating accessible (or for the cynical, “pretty”) content is only part of what makes good design powerful. The human-centered design process is geared toward solving specific problems. This process has been formalized in many ways (e.g., IDEO’s Human Centered Design, Marc Hassenzahl’s User Experience Design, or Braden Kowitz’s Story-Centered Design), but the basic idea is that you have to explore the breadth of the possible before you can isolate truly innovative ideas.

In this talk, I'll share some lessons we've learned from the human-centered design process and how those lessons can be used by other data science practitioners.

Amazon Redshift enables customers to innovate quickly using its fully managed and immensely scalable data warehousing solution. Tableau’s ability to connect directly to Redshift and leverage its massive computing power means even the most non-technical business user can quickly discover business insights with easy to use drag and drop visual analytics against mammoth data sets. Join Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mixpo and Tableau Software, an AWS Technology Partner, to learn how customers are leveraging both Tableau and AWS to tackle big data exploration projects and recognize business benefits in record time.

Big Data is a top IT priority, yet many organizations are still in the early stages of deploying Hadoop and new data processing frameworks such as Spark. One of the challenges that slows down adoption is getting all the infrastructure and systems up and running. It’s a complex process and can often take weeks or even months.

Join this webinar with Nik Rouda, senior analyst for Big Data at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), and Anant Chintamaneni, vice president of products at BlueData, to learn:

• How to evaluate infrastructure deployment options (e.g. on-premises, Hadoop-as-a-Service)
• Big Data infrastructure best practices, use cases, and real-world examples
• How to leverage new technologies to speed up deployment for faster time-to-value with Big Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) has now become a mainstream term but much of the attention is focused on the latest gadgets rather than its potential in super-charging efficiencies of every industry sector. Whether it's using connected devices to monitor the health of a patient or an elderly relative in their homes, GE"s smart jet engines that transmit terabytes of data on its condition in-flight or ensuring miners' safety and productivity with integrated communications, tracking and real-time analytics; Internet of Things can have a monumental impact on global economy, with the forecast of over $14 trillion in the next two decades, according to latest research by Accenture.

But what does this all mean for IT professionals? Beyond the trade show gadgets, IoT initiatives require immense support from all IT functions. Collecting, storing and alayzing immense amounts of data, which can be easily accessed in the cloud at any time and securely shared across connected devices is no easy feat. Moreso, a standardized set of guiding principles is essential for governance and proper implementation of every supported initiative.

Join this expert panel session, featuring some of the leading industry minds, as they share unique perspectives and vision into into the future of IoT and join the conversation in an interactive Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

Panelists include:
- Mac Devine, Vice President SDN Cloud Services and CTO, IBM Cloud Services Division
- Stephen Mellor, CTO, Industrial Internet Consortium
- Jeff Smith, CTO & EVP, Numerex
- Darin Andersen, CEO, CyberUnited

Some of the most critical data required to solve analytical problems in the healthcare and life sciences world lack the type of keys that we rely on so heavily in other domains. This session will focus on solutions to the fundamental data connectivity challenges in this area and how to enable impactful analytics on a few high value but disconnected healthcare data sources.

Organizations of all types and sizes are awash in Big Data but lack the right tools to take advantage. Discover how to get the most from your own stores of information with a solution that provides everything from fast analytics and ease of use to ubiquitous to database and cloud services through smart dashboards and automatic updates.

Join us for a webinar with Lucidworks CTO and Apache Solr committer Grant Ingersoll for a guided tour of the latest release of Solr. You'll learn about SolrCloud hardening, clusterstate improvements, the schema and solrconfig APIs, easier ZooKeeper management, improved flexible and schemaless indexing, and overall ease-of-use improvements.

The session will explore practical development in realising digital strategies that empower your business and provide guidance for improving digital value. We will look past the hype of digital leadership and disruption towards practical considerations of how data integration plays a central role in how technologies, innovation and economics work in a new digital information era. Many organisations are inundated with DIGITIZATION of their business model presenting both an opportunity and challenge to leadership, cultural and operating performance realisation. A paradox exists; the ability to manage the explosion of data, connectivity, and devices as well as the impact on skills, products and services, regulation and security, and the organisational value chain network and wider market dynamics. Mark will discuss the findings of PA’s digital barometer and explore the ramifications for leaders in their pursuit of digital excellence. He will demonstrate how digital thinking has led to new forms of digital value through new business strategies that address how experience and outcomes. Providing connected spaces is enabled by understanding how data and its usage in context is shaping the new organisation of the future.

Takeaways
· How does your business shape up in the digital economy.

· What holistic considerations really matter in digital thinking for your business and the role of data in the new digital enterprise.

· Case studies of practical evidence of how to join up business spaces with an integrated thinking approach

Apache Spark (http://spark.apache.org/) is emerging as the next generation of technology for data processing. Compared to Hadoop MapReduce, Spark is easier to use and maintain, increasing its popularity, which is due to the fact that it excels in in-memory computations (many times faster than MapReduce). This also allows Spark to be the de-facto platform for machine learning algorithms at scale.

In this presentation, the Spark platform will be introduced to the audience by:
• Walking through interesting features of Spark
• Comparing and contrasting it with Hadoop
• Highlighting Spark use cases and its ecosystem

Analytics clusters, typified by Hadoop, commonly use just a bunch of disks (JBOD) embedded in cluster nodes to create a storage layer. However, because users now want to run multiple applications within these clusters, this layer has to take on the characteristics of persistent storage where data can be maintained for long time periods. This webinar will review, evaluate and discuss implementations of persistent storage now emerging for Big Data that go well beyond just bunches of disks.

In this presentation, we will provide an introduction to Apache Ignite (incubating), which is an open source, distributed framework for a unified In-Memory Data Fabric, originally developed by GridGain Systems. Apache Ignite provides a high-performance, distributed in-memory data management software layer that has been designed to operate between both new and existing data sources and applications, boosting application performance and scale by orders of magnitude.

We know big data is growing and represents a huge opportunity to mine competitive business value. Some even propose landing all corporate data first in a big data lake to make it available for multiple downstream uses. And soon, all your data could be thought of as big data. But what happens with enterprise storage? How do we protect that big data and apply corporate storage governance? How do support storage workflows on the backend? In this panel, we'll discuss some of the hottest trends and newest solutions for storing, protecting, and leveraging big data in the corporate IT data center.

The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, big data and IoT aren’t just plays for the enterprise. In fact, these areas present SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact and highlights the storage implications. Learn how your business can plug into the trends to deliver value in the long term.

Organizations generate huge volumes of data that double every two years on average, the vast majority of which is unstructured. While the volume and velocity of big data increases, there are costs, risks and usability challenges associated with managing big data including end-to-end data risk protection, search, discovery and access – regardless of the file type, size or device. Data–intensive verticals that strive to gain insights from big data can gain tremendous competitive advantage by taking a data centric storage approach.

Learn How To:
· Tap into the full value of vast stores of big data
· Meet increasing compliance regulations & ensure long-term preservation of data
· Ensure massive scalability, protection & security of big data
· Gain a greater competitive advantage & make improved informed decisions

Big data has proven its value in many industries, but it has resurfaced the age old tension between storage performance and capacity. Advancements brought about with state of the art storage technologies can resolve this tension in big data environments.

Join us and learn:

- How flash can help accelerate big data analytics

- The pros and cons for both all-flash and hybrid storage systems

- How real-life organizations have used flash to overcome big data storage challenges and significantly reduce IT costs