The Data Warehousing Institute and Information Builders invited us to participate in their half-day conference “Big Data. Social Media.“. The event took place today in New York at the Information Builders headquarters. We enjoyed listening to diverse group of speakers including KPMG Business Intelligence Practice Director Glenn Peipert, startup Bundle.com Chief Data Scientist Alex Hasha and Information Builder’s own Sr. Systems Engineer Dan Grady. Some takeaway points for us were:
- KPMG has created a comprehensive project roadmap for Big Data projects
- Open source vendors are recognized by enterprise clients as fast-moving
- Big Data is not useful until refined
- Batching by geographies and text clustering are techniques to reduce problem scale
- Data has to be tamed for fast iterative experimentation
- Linking data from different domains such as social networks, sales, commisions etc. can be a challenge
- (no doubt /db can help here by making databases appear as web services)