EMC World’s theme was Cloud Meets Big Data, and the theme was addressed in the ongoing explosion of data, which includes big data in the form of new types of information, such as utility meter readings, RFID transmissions, and the aggregation of individually small but collectively enormous amounts of data gathered on the Internet. It also includes the rising tide of already big data files, such as medical images, video surveillance, broadcasting and entertainment, and genomics.
EMC has made big data a centerpiece with its acquisition of Greenplum and Isilon to complement its existing Atmos solutions. EMC recognizes that when it buys a company it is not only getting intellectual property, it is also getting the brainpower that led to the success of the acquired company in the first place. The first question that I asked Luke Lonergan, the head of Greenplum, in my one-on-one discussion with him was, “Do you feel each morning as if you have died and gone to heaven?” He laughed and said, “Yes, but a heaven with challenges.”
Greenplum’s involvement with Hadoop has obviously attracted a great deal of attention, and with good cause. Lonergan views Hadoop as good, but incomplete. For example, Greenplum can help with making Hadoop more real-time-oriented rather than batch-focused and, by so doing, extend Hadoop’s capabilities, such as performing Twitter sentiment analysis in real-time. To me, the openness to new approaches, such as the non-relational database approach favored by Hadoop, as well as thinking about how social networking data from multiple
sources might be fused together to provide real-time insight indicates that Greenplum is one of the brighter drum majors in the big data parade.
But it doesn’t stop there. A new partnership with SAS, a proven leader in analytics, which involves SAS running on EMC Greenplum products, seems to me to be another vindication of the strategy. Apart from supporting open
source, from which wise IT vendors have benefited, seemingly contradictorily, for years, EMC also promoted a summit within a summit with the industry’s first Data Scientists meeting following EMC World 2011. That is important because new ways of thinking about data are going to be increasingly crucial in the era of Big Data.
Unfortunately, there is a limit to any report, and many of my copious notes will remain unused as I can’t get around to going into detail about keynotes, product announcements and private discussions at this time.
However, I wanted to communicate to you three things related to EMC World 2011:
1. The three layers where change is transforming IT--at the infrastructure, applications development and end user computing levels--as communicated by Paul Maritz in an elegant, vendor-neutral (albeit with a VMware flavor)
manner, was important in how it provided practical and strategic context to what enterprises will experience and incorporate in planning for the cloud.
2 . There was a reinforcement of the idea that cloud computing has been and remains a journey, and that you can’t just up and buy a cloud today. Instead, IT will have to implement structure and discipline in many places, such
as designing and building service catalogs, and not just by performing virtualization/consolidation alone.
3 . There was the notion that big data is, yes, a big deal. Not only is it a big deal for traditional vertical industries, such as broadcast and entertainment, but also to a broader base of companies, such as those that can benefit from new sources of data, like tracking/analyzing online user sentiments. But, as with the cloud, using big data is an ongoing journey, where figuring out what
data is needed, collecting it and then analyzing it for insight that can lead to action remain works in progress. Hey, that is a good challenge to have, especially when you consider the potential benefits.
EMC World 2011 covered a lot more ground than these three points. However, it should be enough for one day to understand that there are three IT trends that you have to deal with simultaneously, that getting to the cloud is a journey that will take time and effort, and that you have to know that big data is real so that you can deal with it more effectively.
EMC is currently a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.
