Coming To A Place Near You: A Private Cloud Spiked With Big Data

Yesterday, I moderated a couple of panels at the Big Data Cloud event. I have been a keynote speaker, panelist, moderator, and participant for many conferences in the last few years. It has always been a pleasure to see the cloud and big data becoming more and more mainstream. Here are my quick observations and insights from the event:

Private cloud getting momentum: As a public cloud proponent I thought I would never have to write this. But lately I have seen more and more interest in private cloud; new start-ups, established cloud vendors, and large legacy vendors are designing private or hybrid cloud solutions. Vendors have recognized that prospects and customers have started to take cloud very seriously but they still have the same concerns what they had few years back: security, moving data to public cloud, and giving up control. I am not interested in the private/public debate (though I do love to mess with fellow clouderati on Twitter on this topic). My take on this trend is that the vendors should do whatever it takes to move the organizations to the cloud, private or public. Once companies dip their toes, they themselves will realize what's good for them.

Big Data as a serious category: A few days back, I blogged about big data going mainstream. Coming out from this event, it felt like, today Big Data is where cloud was a couple of years back. When I asked people a few years back "What's Hadoop?" They would reply "Huh?" Now, everyone wants to know more about Hadoop, Hive, HBase, S4, Oozie, Pig, Cassandra, and other big data frameworks. They're interested in analyzing and comparing available solutions. They're asking all the right questions. The VC investment in this category has been record high. Hadoop World was a sold out event this year with 1500 participants. Milind Bhandarkar, Chief Architect with Greenplum Labs, mentioned that in 2008, during the first Hadoop summit, they had to coax people to come to the summit. The people who willingly came to the summit either worked for Yahoo or Facebook. We have come a long way and there's a long way to go but this is a rock solid category. As the first set of big data infrastructure companies settle in we will see people building killer applications and PaaS solutions specifically designed to leverage big data. It is encouraging to see more and more companies and venture capitalists recognizing that the data is worth a lot more if they have the right tools and right people — the data scientists — to do something interesting with it. For example, Greylock partners have hired DJ Patil as a "data scientist in residence" to help them with evaluating their opportunities and advising their portfolio companies on big data strategies.

Rise in popularity of open source frameworks: If you follow the history of open source you'll realize that when a proprietary way of doing things become popular, commercial vendors pose a lock-in threat, and things don't work as expected, developers get frustrated and start to work on filling that gap by building open source technology. Linux started that way and so were many other open source projects. This is why I am excited to see OpenStack gaining rapid momentum. It's slowly becoming a de-facto standard to build a commercial cloud solutions. I also like Cloud Foundry since many companies that I know of, ISVs and large IT shops, won't use a public PaaS. They would prefer to launch their own PaaS solution in the cloud. Without an open source solution, it does become a big challenge.

Emergent Cloud Computing Business Models

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...

A Data Scientist's View On Skills, Tools, And Attitude

I recently came across this interview (thanks Dharini for the link!) with Nick Chamandy, a statistician a.k.a a data scientist at Google. I would encourage you to read it; it does have some great points. I found the following snippets interesting: Recruiting data scientists: When posting job opportunities, we are cognizant that people from different academic fields tend to use different language, and we don’t want to miss out on a great candidate because he or she comes from a non-statistics background and doesn’t search for the right keyword. On my team alone, we have had successful “statisticians” with degrees in statistics, electrical engineering, econometrics, mathematics, computer science, and even physics. All are passionate about data and about tackling challenging inference problems. I share the same view. The best scientists I have met are not statisticians by academic training. They are domain experts and design thinkers and they all share one common trait: they love data!...

Reveiw: Celluon Epic Laser Keyboard

The Celluon Epic is a Bluetooth laser keyboard. The compact device projects a QWERTY keyboard onto most flat surfaces. (Glass tabletops being the exception) You can connect the Epic to vertically any device that supports Bluetooth keyboards including devices running iOS , Android , Windows Phone, and Blackberry 10. On the back of the device there is a charging port and pairing button. Once you have the Epic paired with your device it acts the same as any other keyboard. For any keyboard the most important consideration is the typing experience that it provides. The virtual keyboard brightness is adjustable and is easy to see in most lighting conditions. Unfortunately the brightness does not automatically adjust based on ambient light. With each keystroke a beeping sound is played which can be turned down. The typing experience on the Epic is mediocre at best. Inadvertently activating the wrong key can make typing frustrating and tiring. Even if you are a touch typist you'll still ...

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