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Analytics

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PaulR
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

Last week I flew to New York to participate in a panel at Interop 2013. The panel was focused on whether Big Data was more than Hadoop. The answer to that question is obviously yes (just ask our friends at MongoDB) but what was interesting to me was the different approaches being taken to solving for that reality. The panel included representatives of companies as diverse as SAP, Datameer, and MongoDB – and of course me from Alteryx.

 

The good news is that delivering ways to get value from Big Data was front and center to all the participants. The bad news is that I heard a lot of thinking that, to me, belongs back in the 1990’s or at best the level of maturity represented in Big Data discussions in 2010. The mega vendors approach to getting value from Big Data appears to be replicating the data warehouse approach of data consolidation to a unified architecture. While this delivers the advantage of data cleansing, preparation, and consistency, it definitively places the Big Data effort and value in the hands of IT. It will also put the timetable to value at the pace of IT projects, not the pace of business. Analysts in line of business functions need access to this data now.

 

The other perspective I heard was heavily reliant on the virtues of Hadoop. I am a firm believer in the value of Hadoop as part of an organization’s infrastructure, however any valuable analysis will require lots of different types and sources of data – as Matt Marshall, our moderator for the panel, points out. This requires at least a Hadoop+ approach to be Big Data analytics.

 

For value to be the next phase of Big Data, we definitely need to get real deployments of technologies like Hadoop but then we really need to get that data into the hands of the analysts with real business problems and questions to address. Then we need get them all the data they need.



Paul Ross

VP of Product & Industry Marketing

Alteryx