COMMENTARY
This conference should be very interesting ... but from the TVM perspective there is something very important that is missing. When the organizers talk about 'the uncovering of new business opportunities', exactly what do they mean. Based on recent history ... as in the last 40 years ... business opportunities are all about ways to make more and more profit, but what society needs is for systems and processes that helps to identify ways for there to be more valueadd for society. In some cases more profit and more valueadd go hand in hand, but there are many big valueadd needs that do not have associated profit. TVM concerns itself with this situation as much or more than the case of merely the profit opportunities.

Somehow the valueadd issue needs to be brought into the conversation, and as soon as possible.
Peter Burgess

Structure:Data The Big Picture for Big Data

Are you sitting on un-mined gold? As the volume of enterprise data created has moved past terabytes and into the petabyte scale, companies need to determine the best way for them to store, manage and analyze all that information.

GigaOM’s Structure:Data, now a two-day conference, will assemble the world’s leading technologists, practitioners and business leaders to offer solutions to the questions posed by the growth of big data, including storage needs, data analysis and the uncovering of new business opportunities.

Join us in New York on March 21 and 22, 2012. Register now and save $200!.

Our program is shaping up nicely. Take a peek at the themes we’ll be covering:

Infrastructure.
Where will your data reside? What teams and technology do you need to make it work? We’ll look at hard drives, network storage, appliances and even the cloud as potential repositories where data can be stored and accessed.

Algorithms.
All that data you’re storing should be making you smarter and customers happier. We’ll take a closer look at algorithms built on top of Hadoop and other big data tools. From slicker recommendation engines to machine-learning to predictive analytics, the value in big data is all in how your software processes it. Putting Big Data to Work.
How are businesses using big data to create a “business of information” and deliver new products to their customers? At Structure:Data, you’ll hear companies talk about the benefits of big data strategy and solutions for their industries.

Startups.
While today’s current big data technologies are still big news, a whole new crop of solutions are entering the market. What ideas will you glean from learning about big data’s disruptive, young upstarts?

Over the two-day conference, in workshops and in-depth discussions, we’ll tackle these questions:

• What can you do with your big data? What are your options?
• Which companies are generating the most big data? What can you learn from their approaches?
• Who are the people you need to hire to help manage your data? How should you train your IT department on these new solutions?
• What should you be planning for over the next 18 months?
• Which technologies and companies should you be watching?
• How do others make sense of their data? And what do you need to make sense of your data?
• What do CIOs need to think about?
• Which solutions and approaches should you be implementing for your company?