COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Structure:Data 2011 7:30 AM REGISTRATION AND BREAKFAST 8:25 AM OPENING REMARKS Speakers: Om Malik – Founder, GigaOM Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM Emcee – Chris Albrecht – Creative Director, GigaOM 8:30 AM THE NEW ALCHEMISTS – THE DATA SCIENTISTS PANEL For years, traditional companies have been storing more and more data as the cost of storage has been getting less and less expensive. The hope is that one day these mountains of data will yield insights that lead toward a competitive advantage. The critical element in turning the “straw” of data into “gold” are the data scientists who are applying statistical and computational wizardry to the data in order to derive the insights. Find out about the innovations and state of the art pragmatic approaches as we talk to some of the biggest thought innovators in industrial-grade, big data science. Moderated by: Jason Hoffman – Founder and Chief Scientist, Joyent Speakers: Terry Jones – CEO and Founder, Fluidinfo Hilary Mason – Chief Scientist, bit.ly Bill McColl – Founder and CEO, Cloudscale Bassel Ojjeh – President and CEO, nPario 9:00 AM BIG DATA, NEW PHYSICS, AND GEOSPATIAL SUPER-FOOD As large collections of data come together some very exciting, and somewhat unexpected things happen. As data grows the quality of predictions improve (less false positives, less false negatives), poor quality data starts to become helpful, and computation can actually get faster as the number of records grows. Now, add to this, the “space-time-travel” data about how people move that is being created by billions of mobile devices and what becomes computable is outright amazing. As it turns out geospatial data is analytic super-food. Speakers: Jeff Jonas – Distinguished Engineer, IBM 9:20 AM RETHINKING DATA ANALYSIS IN THE AGE OF COMMODITY STORAGE The database systems of old were designed for online transaction processing in an era when the cost of disk storage was super-high. Now that the cost of storage continues to drop, what technology “norms” can we rethink and what impact will it have on the data warehousing industry? In this talk, GreenPlum Co-founder Scott Yara discusses opportunities the industry has to rethink old approaches and what further innovations we’re likely to see the industry take as the costs of compute and storage in the cloud age continue to drop. Moderated by: George Gilbert – Co-founder and Partner, TechAlpha Speakers: Scott Yara – Co-Founder, Greenplum and VP of Products, EMC Data Computing Products Division, EMC Corp. 9:40 AM THE “MACHINE GRAPH” MEETS THE SOCIAL GRAPH TO TRANSFORM IT COMMERCE What if millions of businesses could tap into their collective IT network data to solve problems, share best practices, and get good deals? It’s happening today as Spiceworks link’s the “machine graph” with the social graph to transform the way IT work is done. Their insights could revolutionize how $1 trillion in technology products are marketed and sold each year. Speakers: Ted Nitka – Evangelist, Cool New Things, Spiceworks 9:50 AM WOULD SHAKESPEARE TWEET? THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK BUSINESS IN REAL TIME An open secret: the book business is in brisk transition from the physical to the digital. The adoption curve of ebooks is one of the steepest in history and thriving in the new reading landscape means analyzing mammoth data sets to understand the diversity of consumption patterns, reading platforms, personal preferences and demographics. Speakers: Marc Parrish – VP, Retention and Loyalty Marketing, Barnes & Noble.com 10:10 AM BIG BLUE OCEANS OF DATA IBM acquired Netezza this year for the the grand sum of $1.7 billion. For years, Netezza led the warehousing appliance space with a fast product, built on cutting-edge technology. In this fireside chat, we talk to Netezza CEO Jim Baum about where the warehousing and analytics industry is heading as Netezza merges with the already-strong data management product portfolio of industry behemoth, IBM. Moderated by: Om Malik – Founder, GigaOM Speakers: Jim Baum – CEO, Netezza, an IBM Company 10:30 AM BREAK (Optional Workshops) 10:30 AM EMC WORKSHOP Your Data Rules the World A defining characteristic of modern life is the incredible proliferation of digital information. The Economist estimates that the amount of information created each year is growing at a 60% compounded rate. According to the Harvard Business Review, we humans generated more data last year than in all of previous human history. Big Data management and advanced analytic processing are highly relevant to both our personal and professional lives. Now is the time to get involved, learn how to unlock the power of Big Data and ride the crest of an incredible wave of innovation and influence on every aspect of our lives. Speakers: Luke Lonergan – Co-Founder, Greenplum and CTO, Data Computing Products Division, EMC Corp. 10:30 AM PARACCEL WORKSHOP The Power and Promise of Big Data Analytics The age of Big Data Analytics is upon us. Today’s enterprises are accumulating data at an ever increasing rate, scope and scale. While questions along the lines of “What happened?” or “What is happening?” continue to be important for operational execution, answers to questions of the form “What will happen?” and “Why?” are becoming increasingly critical for firms to maintain competitive advantage. In other words, the age of advanced and predictive analytics is upon us! Speakers: Bala Narasimhan – Director, Product Management, ParAccel Jim Zhang – Partner, Fuzzy Logix 10:30 AM SPLUNK WORKSHOP Gaining Operational Visibility from Massive Amounts of Machine Data From customer behaviors and usage statistics to security postures and operational analytics, Splunk has the unique ability to make sense of all types of machine data, structured or unstructured, and mash it up with other business data for complete real-time visibility and operational intelligence. This session, with examples from one of the nation’s largest media organizations, demonstrates a new approach for analyzing your organization’s data to derive real-time insights from terabytes to petabytes of data. Speakers: Sondra Russell – Metrics Analyst, Large National Media Organization Erik Swan – CTO and Co-Founder, Splunk 11:10 AM THE COMING REVOLUTION IN STATISTICS The field of statistics is changing before our eyes, spurred by disruptive technological change. It was long assumed that increases in hardware speeds would allow us to continue using our existing algorithms and code as data set sizes increased. However, the explosion of “big data” has made it clear this is not the case, and is forcing organizations to re-evaluate their analytical methods on a fundamental level including such steps as to create a specific computer language for complex statistical analysis. Speakers: Lee Edlefsen – Chief Scientist, Revolution Analytics 11:20 AM CASH FOR YOUR DATA? THE FUTURE FOR DATA MARKETS If your data is valuable to you, then might others think it’s worth money? Better still, all that data you think isn’t valuable may have value for others: so valuable that they pay you for it. We’ve been seeing the emergence of “data markets,” where an intermediary brokers the sale or lease of your data to third parties. Is it safe? How might it compromise your business model? What if a competitor buys it? There will be many dilemmas as well as many solutions as the sector emerges. We sit down with two pioneering companies in this space to discuss what the future holds for data markets. Moderated by: Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM Speakers: Moe Khosravy – Product Unit Manager for Windows Azure DataMarket, Microsoft Flip Kromer – CTO, Infochimps 11:40 AM SPINNING OUT A NEW BUSINESS FROM EXISTING DATA That’s exactly what Citibank did! The company took decades upon decades of anonymized credit card and fiscal transactions and mined it to find patterns in how people spend money. From these patterns, Citibank was able to spin out Bundle.com. Come hear the founder and CEO of Bundle detail how the company was able to find patterns in the data and how Bundle as a proposition was born. Take away ideas for how your company’s big data may precipitate a new offshoot. Speakers: Jaidev Shergill – CEO and Founder, Bundle 11:50 AM HOW TO CHANGE ALMOST EVERYTHING – CRACKING TRUE PARALLELIZATION When we crack the “grand challenge” of parallelization for difficult problems, it will change everything. We will suddenly be able to tackle much larger problems than ever before at a much lower cost — but not without subsequent problems. Network capacity and storage capacity will be severely strained, and to consistently achieve these results, we will have to re-write everything. In this talk with Dave Hitz — data storage pioneer, co-founder of NetApp, and recipient of the 2007 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award — we talk about how changing our thinking and our development ecosystem will be crucial in the big data future we all seek. Moderated by: Jason Hoffman – Founder and Chief Scientist, Joyent Speakers: Dave Hitz – Founder and EVP, NetApp 12:10 PM IS BIG DATA NOW BIG NEWS? Bloomberg has helped create the business of real-time industry information. For the last 30 years, Bloomberg has developed innovative, real-time information products that big businesses have built their success on and now depend upon. The company’s acquisition of Business Week and its hiring of Kevin Krim suggest new directions for the company and its products. How will Bloomberg now translate its heritage and strength as a real-time business data supplier to providing business news and analysis for a “real-time” web audience? Moderated by: Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM Speakers: Kevin Krim – Global Head of Bloomberg Digital, Bloomberg L.P. 12:30 PM LUNCH (Optional Workshops) 12:30 PM ASPERA WORKSHOP Accelerating Productivity in the Big Data Era Organizations need to deploy flexible, integrated information technology capable of scaling resources with unpredictable and rapid data growth. This session will detail how combining advanced big-data WAN optimization technology with leading-edge scale-out NAS can drive system-wide efficiency, enable universal collaboration and ensure IT organizations are able to positively couple big-data and productivity. Speakers: Michelle Munson – President, CEO and Co-Founder, Aspera Brett Helsel – SVP of Engineering, Isilon Systems 12:30 PM ASTER DATA AND DELL WORKSHOP MapReduce and the RDBMS in One: Interactive Analytics on Diverse Data The either-or decision about SQL and NoSQL limits your insights. What if you had both procedural MapReduce processing and the strengths of a SQL RDBMS on one platform (no data migration) for fast, interactive analytics on diverse data? Attend this session to hear how data scientists and business analysts can seamlessly combine their work to innovate faster. See how In-Database MapReduce powers deeper social network analysis, personalization, marketing attribution, risk analysis, and more. Speakers: Kevin Van Mondfrans – Director, Cloud Solutions, Dell Data Center Solutions Steve Wooledge – Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Aster Data 12:30 PM EQUINIX WORKSHOP Creating an Enabling Architecture for Cloud and IT Services Having great application software and fast hardware are only half the battle. A scalable deployment architecture is equally necessary to achieve the economic and operational advantages of mainstream cloud services. This workshop explores key elements of cloud deployment architecture and calls attention to the key considerations necessary for a high quality end-user experience. Speakers: Lou Najdzin – Director, Global Cloud Computing, Equinix 1:30 PM THE MANY FACES OF MAP REDUCE – HADOOP AND BEYOND Map Reduce, in the form of Hadoop, along with NoSQL software solutions has spearheaded much of the popularity around Big Data. Today it seems like any technologist you talk to has Map Reduce on their mind. In all it’s popularity it would be easy to think that EVERYTHING should use Map Reduce, but is that really the case? In this panel we talk to some of the innovators who are building their product propositions around Map Reduce, about what their customers are actually using Map Reduce for and where. Is Hadoop the only solution to consider? Where does Map Reduce work and where does a traditional RDBMS work better? What does Hadoop’s awesome power enable for a business? This and many more questions around the world of Map Reduce and Hadoop for the enterprise. Moderated by: Gary Orenstein – VP of Product and Technical Marketing, Fusion-io Speakers: Amr Awadallah – CTO and VP, Engineering, Cloudera Mike Hoskins – CTO and GM, Integration Products, Pervasive Software Dwight Merriman – CEO and Co-Founder, 10gen Todd Papaioannou – VP Cloud Architecture, Yahoo! Ben Werther – VP of Products, DataStax 2:10 PM THINKING ON A BIG, BIG, BIGGER SCALE Andy Bechtolsheim is a legend in the computer industry and High Performance Computing world. He has co-founded several game changing startups — most notably Sun Microsystems, Granite Systems (that produced Gigabit Ethernet), and more recently, Arista Networks. At Arista, his focus is on creating ultra-high-speed connections between the machines that make up a warehouse-scale data center deployment. In this chat with Andy, we’ll talk about the progression of computer technology and what technology challenges are before the industry as we embark on a big data future. Moderated by: Om Malik – Founder, GigaOM Speakers: Andy Bechtolsheim – Founder and CDO, Arista Networks 2:30 PM CAUSAL MODELING FOR BIG DATA Dataspora has a long history of solving data mining problems for clients. One of their innovations has been to engineer custom compute platforms optimized to solve a compute intensive class of problems – Bayesian reasoning. In this talk they talk about how this platform was built and how it can enable previously inaccessible individual-level decision-making across many verticals, from healthcare to banking to telecom. Speakers: Bruce Church – VP, Numerics, Dataspora/Via Science 2:40 PM THE PRODIGIOUSNESS OF DATA While processor performance, network bandwidth, and storage capacity have grown remarkably, the growth in user communities and the data they create is even more remarkable. It’s hard for us to internalize the scale, and thus see the benefits that can result. I’ll discuss some older ideas that are now becoming universal, and newer thoughts (such as Hybrid Intelligence) that are beginning to have powerful impacts. Speakers: Alfred Spector – VP of Research and Special Initiatives, Google 3:00 PM ARCHITECTING FOR BIG DATA ANALYTICS Big data is here today, but what comes next? How are leading-edge companies extracting value out of hoards of diverse data? Big data analytics is not just about volume, but the diversity and velocity of data flowing in companies. As many say it is about volume, variety and velocity. Systems of the future need to make it easy to slice and dice big data and quickly test business hypotheses. Come to this session to hear Dr. Mayank Bawa, Chief Customer Officer of Aster Data, share how data scientists are architecting systems to support the speed, ease, and agility of next generation big data analytics. Speakers: Mayank Bawa – Chief Customer Officer and Co-Founder, Aster Data 3:10 PM BIG DATA IN REAL TIME: TALES FROM DRINKING AT THE TWITTER FIREHOSE The social media revolution has led to the digitization of conversations and consumer sentiment on a massive scale. The size and complexity of the data associated with this real-time web of conversations is unprecedented, and brings an array of new opportunities for businesses large and small. This talk explores the new algorithms that allow marketers to harness this abundant but largely untapped resource. Speakers: Braxton Woodham – CTO and Co-Founder, Tap11 3:20 PM SUPERCOMPUTING ON A MINIMUM WAGE Renting a hundred machine cluster on Amazon’s EC2 service now costs less than $10 an hour, and software advances like Hadoop make it easy to take advantage of this amazing computing power. Discover the vital tools, services and techniques you need to turn your data exhaust into valuable insights, and find out how they got me sued by Facebook. Speakers: Pete Warden – Founder, OpenHeatMap 3:30 PM BREAK (Optional Workshops) 3:30 PM FUSION-IO WORKSHOP Flash in the Datacenter – Big Data Demands Big Performance IT infrastructures have been scaled-out and scaled-up to meet growing demand for big data in enterprise organizations. Given the massive amounts of information that companies now process daily, innovative IT professionals are looking beyond the unsustainable path of adding more storage arrays or more CPU to meet exponential data demand. In this discussion, Gary Orenstein, Fusion-io Vice President of Product and Technical Marketing, will examine which big data organizations are most suited to benefit from the implementation of flash memory in the data center. Gary will also explore how flash memory architecture fits into the big data “distributed approach” ecosystem. The session will also provide an overview of the types of flash memory solutions and where and how should they be used for optimal results and data security. Speakers: Gary Orenstein – VP of Product and Technical Marketing, Fusion-io 3:30 PM MOHR DAVIDOW WORKSHOP Data-Driven Advertising The advertising world is undergoing rapid change as advertisers and their audiences spend increasing amounts of time online. New ways to inform and engage also creates incredible demands on infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and real-time delivery. Hear industry experts describe how advertisers, consumers and companies are responding as well as where and how big data is reinventing advertising online. Moderated by: Katherine Barr – Partner, Mohr Davidow Speakers: Jason Feffer – Founder and Former CEO, Soda Head Joe Marchese – SVP, Marketing and Digital, fuse.tv Basem Nayfeh – CTO, Audience Science Brian Shin – CEO, Visible Measures 3:30 PM KOGNITIO WORKSHOP How Deep-Dive Media Analytics on Big Data has Created New Revenue Streams for Networks and Advertisers NYC-based media monitoring and marketing research company, TRA, offers on-demand research and ROI analyses of TV advertising spend by performing deep-dive analytics on 50TB of integrated high quality data. This case study will highlight how TRA overcame the traditional bottlenecks of analyzing large data, and how they can ask any question of their data and get answers in seconds. Speakers: Mark Lieberman – CEO, TRA 4:10 PM THE BIG BIG BIG PICTURE: QUANTIFYING THE AGGREGATE RISK IN BANKING Wall Street and its banks create some of the most critical demands on infrastructure for data analysis. They manage numerous and broad investments that are individually gauged for risk. How can a bank now aggregate those investment projects, often running into thousands of silo’s and each with their own decision infrastructure and derive a real time indicator of the real exposure that a Financial institution has? We have invited some of the leading infrastructure experts on Wall street to share their insights about how to architect systems to gain these insights and crack the big problems of Data Mining. A not to be missed panel. Moderated by: Jim Smith – General Partner, Mohr Davidow Speakers: Minder Cheng – Board Member, Investment Technology Group Thomas Chippas – Managing Director, Barclays Capital Barry Zane – Founder and CTO, ParAccel 4:40 PM STREAMLINING THE INFORMATION PIPELINE: HOW TO DRIVE TOWARDS ZERO LATENCY Estimates suggest that more than 90% of all data was created in the last two years alone. Given this sea of information, competitive advantage goes to those organizations that can successfully identify and utilize actionable information the quickest. This session will explore next generation information platforms and illustrate how you can take major steps towards zero latency within today’s high frequency environments. Speakers: Irfan Khan – CTO, Sybase 5:00 PM THE MASTER DATA WRANGLERS When bringing this conference together, we discovered MacGuyver-like characters, famed as specialists-for-hire: troubleshooters and problem fixers in the world of big data. They represented one thing to us: proven knowledge. In this awesome panel, we bring together the best of these problem-solvers to talk about what they love to do most: solve big data problems quickly with whatever tools they can lay their hands on. Learn what works for them and what they want next in a big data world. Moderated by: Benjamin Black – Co-Founder, fast_ip Speakers: Jim D’Augustine – CTO, Knome Michael Driscoll – Co-Founder, Metamarkets Glenn McDonald – Designer, Needle, ITA Software Theo Schlossnagle – CEO, OmniTI Abe Taha – VP Engineering, Karmasphere 5:40 PM REAL TIME DATA – GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGES Big data and cloud computing are two perfect bed partners. The problem is that they often have a long-distance relationship. The data has to transfer into the cloud, be processed there, and often, be transferred back. That’s quite an ordeal when you’re talking about terabytes and petabytes. The technology world is devising a number of solutions to the problems involved with moving large data sets and keeping it consistent. In this fireside chat, we talk to two leading technologists about the approaches they are taking with moving large data around and keeping it up-to-date and what use cases we’ll need to plan for in the coming years. Moderated by: Ammar Hanafi – General Partner, Alloy Ventures Speakers: Michelle Munson – President, CEO and Co-Founder, Aspera 6:00 PM NURTURING THE BIOLOGICAL DATA SCIENTIST Abundant data and ubiquitous, cheap, and scalable computing are making the data scientist a key driver in the “new biology”. There are no more supercomputing “have-nots”. New (and reinvented) technologies like GPUs and the cloud make large-scale computing available to anyone. The challenge is making these compute resources accessible, and not just available, to data scientists. In this talk Michael outlines efforts to build computing platforms that close the throughput gap between data generation and data analysis in the biosciences. Speakers: Michael Linderman – Engineering Research Associate, Stanford University 6:10 PM DONALD FERGUSON – INSIGHTS FROM THE FRONTLINE CA Technologies has clients that span the Fortune 500. Donald Ferguson spends much of his time working closely with the most powerful decision makers in Enterprise IT about their IT strategy and spend. In this fireside chat, we talk to him about what big data issues keeps a CIO up at night, as well as what CIOs want sooner rather than later. This chat is a must-attend for technologists and entrepreneurs in the audience. Moderated by: Gillian Munson – Managing Director, Allen & Company Speakers: Dr. Donald Ferguson – EVP and CTO, CA Technologies 6:30 PM CLOSING REMARKS AND RACKSPACE COCKTAIL RECEPTION