Highlights from Big Data Nation Atlanta

 
Wow! What a panel. And what a crowd: just soaking up the knowledge from our esteemed big data experts. Chris Anderson is head of technology at Reed Elsevier — and is one of those individuals that believes that his job is more than just doing the HR-supplied description — but in being a thought leader as well.

“We had big problems to solve,” he said of his division Reed Construction Data. “We had data coming in from 120,000 sources [emphasis: mine] and in so many different formats.” The relational infrastructure was struggling under the weight — but more importantly, so was staff, as it was taking more up to 48 hours to “onboard” a new data source. “It wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” he said.

By moving data into MarkLogic — and combining that data with semantically-enriched metadata — he believe Reed will be able to offer new insights, at a premium value. On cue, Jeremy Bentley, CEO for Smart Logic, spoke of the problems of having all that text-based content (he and the others were loathe to say unstructured, for sentences, as any linguist will tell you, inherently has structure!!) and trying to get humans to tag in any sort of consistent and comprehensive way. His company automates the process specific to the needs of that organization — which can further fine-tuned by humans.

The late afternoon event at the Twelve Hotel was kicked off by MarkLogic’s VP of North American Sales Patrick Quigley. In describing what our customers were doing, Quigley offered: they were all looking at the problem at hand differently. And indeed MarkLogic solves the problem differently. Panelist Fernando Mesa, CTO of MarkLogic’s Enterprise division, came out of industry — notably healthcare and publishing. He speaks in very measured tones — carefully explaining nuances. Answering the question you asked — and never making assumptions. He took a step up and back and described what Enterprise NoSQL is, how queries are different, how MarkLogic fits into the enterprise with legacy systems that you can’t rip out. Contrasting to Mesa is Tony Jewitt, VP Big Data at Avalon Consulting LLC. A big guy, big heart and big passion for Big Data. He spoke of the “smart” parking lots that are now “Big Data Parking Lots” — capturing time car arrived, its license plate, the spot it took in the lot.” It wasn’t a huge leap to imagine law enforcement wanting that data when searching for someone.

The audience took it in. In fact, they started brainstorming possible use cases of how MarkLogic might work for their own organizations — to root out fraud, to link agents in ediscovery, to roll up municipal information (so we helpfully pointed out Catalyst, CMS and Fairfax County as examples.) All along, Chris Anderson was the cheerleader — challenging the crowd to step up and be a thought leader.

See ya Atlanta — am off to Chicago! (And good luck San Fran where Jason Hunter is taking my place!)

Big Data Nation Atlanta: Be a Thought Leader from MarkLogic.