When our road show stopped in the City by the Bay, we discussed a different way of doing things – a necessary escape from the relational world because 80% of the world’s data today doesn’t fit into rows and columns. Panelists Christopher Lindblad, Greg Shepherd, Palanivelu (Bala) Balasubramanian, and Jason Hunter chatted about enterprise needs and the impetus to quickly innovate.

The panel was a lively one. MarkLogic Founder Chris Lindblad waved his hands talking about the origins of MarkLogic and how the company is pushing forward with deeper Hadoop integrations, such as running on HDFS. Intel’s Bala Balasubramanian fielded audience questions, talking about optimizations Intel is making to the Intel Distribution for Hadoop; he also spoke of working to make Hadoop better leverage the company’s chipsets and how their enterprise version of Hadoop fits well with MarkLogic’s Enterprise NoSQL database. Sony’s Greg Shepherd told war stories from his involvement at the three different MarkLogic customers where he’s worked: LexisNexis, Cengage, and now, Sony; he elaborated on how his familiarity with MarkLogic helped broaden Sony’s awareness on possible technologies for their new efforts.

When MarkLogic Chief Architect Jason Hunter labeled MarkLogic as a revolutionary database, Shepherd added: “In a matter of months, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of results…a new experience for customers in connecting content — how they find it, how they sell it, how we sell it to them.” Shepherd said Sony’s MarkLogic implementation was customer-facing and revenue-generating, rather than just being a back-end operation. With so much action on so many fronts, we can’t wait to see how else MarkLogic will revolutionize the notion of what a database can do.

MarkLogic Founder Christopher Lindblad fields an audience question rather emphatically
at the InterContinental San Francisco

Big Data Nation Tour: San Francisco from MarkLogic.