Normally, every week at InterWorks is fun and challenging. Last week was a better week than most. It started off last Sunday afternoon in Colorado, progressed to Baltimore and ended with a rare evening return home to Atlanta on Thursday night. I spent Friday working from my house.
What Was So Special?
I spent a few days at a technology conference as a paid expert. My participation in the event is covered under NDA, so I can’t go into details (event name and sponsor). What I’m going to focus on are the people that I met and some interesting tidbits I picked up about the market.
Interesting and Brainy People
I’ve known a few of these people for a couple of years. That list includes:
- Krish Krishnan - Big Data Evangelist, Data Scientist, TDWI Faculty, Executive Consultant, Innovation & Strategy
- Edd Dumbill - VP Strategy, Silicon Valley Associates
- Alex Gorbachev - CTO, Pythian
A few new acquaintances included:
- Matt Asay - VP Community, MongoDB
- Gaurav Gupta - VP of Product Management, Elasticsearch
- Mark Madsen - President and CEO, Third Nature
Every one of these people is an expert with global reputations. It was wonderful to hear their views on the world of Big Data, Hadoop and NoSQL. It was also fascinating to explore the larger context of what kinds of questions the general business community is asking.
Krish Krishnan (left) and Edd Dumbill (right) are very experienced and knowledgeable industry experts. Krish has written three books and probably hundreds of articles. Edd Dumbill started Strata and used to run their events. Talking to either of them is like tapping into walking encyclopedias of technology knowledge.
Alex Gorbachev is a practitioner with a lot of Oracle and growing Hadoop experience, particularly surrounding Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop. He heads Pythian’s technology efforts as their CTO and is full of interesting insights on the Hadoop community.
Matt Asay is the first person that I’ve met from MongoDB. MongoDB may be the most popular NoSQL (document-oriented) database going right now. I asked him how they were doing. The answer - they are currently experiencing rapid growth and have added office space outside of downtown Palo Alto. They are privately-owned, so he wasn’t able to offer more details. Most non-technical folks aren’t familiar with NoSQL or Hadoop. Currently, there are four major categories of NoSQL databases. If you want to know more about them, check-out this post.
Gaurav Gupta is a relatively new VP of Product Management at Elasticsearch - a fast, open-source search engine that powers many of the applications you use on your phone or tablet. Its user base includes Github, Xing, Klout, Soundcloud, Fog Creek (makers of Fogbugz) and McGraw-Hill. Prior to that, Gaurav was VP of Products at Splunk. He knows a thing or two about Big Data and search.
All of these fellows are very smart, experienced and knowledgeable. If you ever get the chance to spend some time with them, you’ll find that their insights are borne from experience.
If I had to pick the most interesting new friend, it would be Mark Madsen. He is President and CEO of Third Nature. Mark is pretty ancient as far as tech folks go (about my age). I spent the first 20 years of life after college doing business (not technology). Mark has an engineering degree and understands hardware, software, coding and data schema. He has literally been involved in every major technology rollout over the past 30 years.
We shared war stories, and it was great fun hearing Mark’s views on Tableau Software (he likes it and uses it himself). Mark is a frequent speaker at conferences all over the world and was co-author of the Wiley-published book, “Clickstream Data Warehousing.”
The Key Take Away
The Hadoop and NoSQL worlds are building momentum. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, you had better get familiar. Right now, they are not widely distributed (the hype is much bigger than actual deployments), but there is clearly value being created by their tools. They take the old BI model (ETL-Database-Analysis) and flip it (Database-ETL-Analysis). Besides being lower-cost platforms to deploy and maintain than traditional RDBMS tools, they offer “schema-less” storage of massive data and run on commodity (not necessarily cheap) hardware.
The Rest of the Week
After leaving the conference, I stopped by my old boss’ house in Evergreen, Colo., to catch-up. He’s teaching a college class on entrepreneurial studies in Denver and told me that he’s using some of the InterWorks story in his class. He asked about “Tableau Your Data!” I sent him a copy to show to his students.
Next, I went to Baltimore to help a client sell a data solution to a large entity. My presentation was more than half of the session, and the prospect was really impressed. At the end of the session, I had that good feeling of bringing another set of new people into the potential of fast and easy visual analytics - the Tableau way.
On Thursday night, Johnnie Hurns (our COO) called me. He was excited about things he’d seen at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston and wanted to swap ideas. Vertica was one of the first database vendors to make a connector to Hadoop, and they talked about progress made in making Vertica and Hadoop the Big Data analytics platform of choice. They were also recently named “Best Columnar Database” by Database Trends and Applications'“2014 Readers’ Choice Awards.” They beat out finalists SAP IQ and InfiniDB.
It’s a rare Friday and weekend for me to be at home. After spending four of the last six weekends on the road, it was a welcome diversion. I started thinking about the next three speeches I’m going to give in Atlanta, Washington D.C. and the 2014 Tableau Conference in Seattle. It’s sold-out, by the way. Tableau is expecting 5,000 customers and another 2,000 employees and partners. Stop by and say hello to us at the InterWorks booth. We’re going to have quite the presence at this year’s conference and have tons of new stuff to show you, especially when it comes to Power Tools for Tableau.