Welcome to this special series of Rational. Talks to You podcasts focusing on Innovate 2013, the IBM

Transcription

1 IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this special series of Rational Talks to You podcasts focusing on Innovate 2013, the IBM Technical Summit. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Innovate 2013 is the premier conference for networking and education for IT and engineering professionals engaged in all aspects of product and system development and software delivery. Our topic today, Tackling Your Big Data Challenges at Innovate. While gaining new insights and creating new opportunities with Big Data is becoming a game changer for today's successful organizations, from enterprise Hadoop to streaming real-time technologies, our Big Data experts will be available at Innovate to assist with your Big Data challenges. Today, Lawrence Weber, program director of Big Data for product marketing for IBM, joins us with details on how attendees can get started with the Big Data experience at Innovate Lawrence, welcome to the podcast series. Thank you for joining us today. WEBER: Hey, thanks so much for having me. -1-

2 Absolutely. Well, Lawrence, tell us, what is Big Data and why is it so important? WEBER: Sure. So every day we create, what is it, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. That's 2.5 with 18 zeros after it. This is big, right? So much that 90 percent of data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere, I mean, sensors that are used to gather climate information, could be social media and the posts around social media sites, digital pictures, digital videos, purchase transaction records and cell phone GPS signals, just to name a few. This data I'm talking about, this is what we refer to as Big Data. Now, that's a basic version. I would actually go so far to personally introduce Big Data more of like a challenge. I would describe this challenge as, are we using all relevant data that is available to us to make better informed, actionable decisions? Are we tapping into this world of Big Data to empower ourselves and our organizations with the insights that we never knew were there? This is why Big Data has become such a big deal, because technology has now advanced to a level where we can tap into stores of data that were once deemed too big, too unstructured. Too fast, right? It's moving too fast to be able to tap into it, to access it, to analyze it. But now -2-

3 we have the ability through technology to access this treasure trove of information that we are terming as Big Data. WEBER: Wow, you said 18 zeros? 2.5 quintillion, yes. That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. So okay. Big Data, big. What does IBM offer to solve Big Data type of challenges? WEBER: So IBM's pretty unique, right? We've developed an enterprise class, we call it a Big Data platform, that allows you to address the full spectrum of Big Data business challenges. And just for clarity around what the platform is, this isn't a product, it's not a single solution. It's actually more...i like to term it more of an ecosystem or an architecture. But it's a little bit more than that. But backing up, why a platform, right? Why a platform versus individual products to address Big Data pain points? Well, the real benefit of a platform is leverage here. It's the ability to start with one capability and easily add others over your organization's Big Data journey. IBM is the only vendor with this broad and balanced view of Big Data with the needs of a platform. The benefit here is -3-

4 preintegration of its components. It reduces your implementation time and cost. So when I talk about a platform, what's actually inside of this, right? So there are products and there are capabilities and there are these technologies that we talked about before that are allowing us to unlock the secrets of Big Data and the number of key areas here. One of the platform capabilities would be the idea of visualization and discovery: discover, understand, search and navigate federated sources of Big Data while leaving data in that place. Well, you might not even know that you have a problem or that you're...where your Big Data challenges may lie or where Big Data is coming into your organization. You first have to look and see, hey, what have you got? What's going on? Federated search allows you to leave that data where it is and look and see and pull and glean insights from stuff you already have. Okay. One of the things that IBM...we acquired a company, Vivisimo last year, and their product has now been rebranded and renamed InfoSphere Data Explorer. This does just that: this empowers people on the end of the phone when you call into, let's say, a service organization

5 And you're like, oh, I'm having trouble with my product, XYZ, that person is going to have more information on you and on the product and on the situation at hand because they have access to discovery of information, they have visualization abilities. And so that's just one aspect of this. Another key platform capability is Hadoop. All right? Hadoop-based analytics. Here we have the ability to store any data type in a low-cost scale Hadoop engine to lower the cost of processing and analyzing massive volumes of data. IBM's product, InfoSphere BigInsight, packages Hadoop for the enterprise. Hadoop is an open source project, so what it allows really to do is really access data that's in mass, that's huge, that's unstructured, that's out there. Think click stream data, think sensor data. And you're not tapping into it. Well, Hadoop allows us to do that quickly, effectively and relatively on the cheap. The thing is it is open source, so IBM has gone through and created a product in InfoSphere BigInsights that ties it all together, puts together for the enterprise, deploys it as an enterprise solution, and then adds special, and I would say, really cool features to it like text analytics, right? -5-

6 To be able to go through all your detailed data in that Big Data and make context from it, understand what the meaning is so you don't have to do it by hand. Visualization tools like BigSheets that allow you to look through, I would say, a spreadsheet-type formula to look at all your Big Data. And there's more and more around this, but that's just one area. A third platform capability -- and these are all part of the Big Data platform -- is stream computing, continuously analyzing massive volumes of streaming data with sub millisecond response times. It's stuff that's moving on the fly. And then the fourth one here I'll talk about just very briefly is data warehousing, right? Just the fact that we're taking information, we're storing information and we want to make better decisions based on it, like business intelligence, business analytics. Well, the data warehouse is also a key core component of this platform. If you think about what we have at an IBM perspective from DB2 through Smart Analytic Systems through acquisition -- remember Netezza -- now PureData for Analytics, there's a heck of a lot of investments across the board in these underpinning technologies. -6-

7 You know, getting back to the platform, and there's more to this as well, and way more than I can get into on this call, but the platform blends traditional technologies that are well suited for structured, repeatable tasks together with the complementary new technologies that address speed and flexibility. And are ideal for this ad hoc data exploration discovery and unstructured analysis, it really comes together and says, you know what? What do you have in store? What infrastructure do you have in place? How do you want to attack your Big Data challenge? But the platform allows you to look at your current infrastructure and determine, where would be the best place for you to invest, the best place for you to say ah-ha, let's look into this Hadoop solution, but leave everything in my infrastructure in place, and then grow as needed. It's not a replacement mentality; it's let's take our current infrastructure and decide, how do we take on our Big Data challenges? IBM has put the technology and the infrastructure in place for our organizational customers to take it as they need. Well, this is awesome. So, what will IBM have specifically at Innovate to address taking those Big Data -7-

8 challenges? WEBER: Yes, so I've gone through a lot of detail [LAUGHTER] and it's really hard to go through it sometimes without a diagram in place. And so we really do have a Big Data experience at Innovate, so you can get more information on some of the aspects I'm talking about here so far, but also really understand the pure benefit and the full extent of the Big Data platform. So at the event we have a number of sessions. So we have a lightning talk and a main tent that we'll be going through, talking through what we're doing from an IBM perspective in Big Data around the Big Data challenges and actually how we utilize Big Data through use cases, how are our customers actually leveraging our technology today to solve their Big Data problems. Right? I mean, there's nothing better than actually hearing how people are really using it and what they're doing with it. But we also have an entire section of sessions. We have at least nine Big Data sessions at the event that go really in depth on different topics and different issues. You know, I mentioned Hadoop. And a lot of people say, what is Hadoop? How do I get involved? This seems a little bit difficult for me. -8-

9 We have a number of our sessions dedicated to programming, right, around InfoSphere BigInsights, our Hadoop offering, a programming overview. We also have Hadoop scripting with the JAQL language. We also have an introduction to Hadoop in general, right, that just walks you through the framework and the open source and all the good pieces and parts. All of these are going to be separate sessions at the actual Innovate event. But it's not just about Hadoop, it's not just about BigInsights, we also have a number of courses on Streams, on InfoSphere Streams. I've mentioned very briefly that Streams deals with real-time information, right, but these are some of the cool, fantastic stories that are out there in Big Data. Think about being able to make decisions as information is flowing through your organization. Right? This is InfoSphere Streams, we're going to have a number of sessions around that as well, and a lot of the other complementary technologies within the Big Data platform. Now, in addition to the sessions that we have at the event, I also want to state that we have two open lab workshops. Right? And these are two workshops that are going to go through...and they're really labs that are going to go through programming on how to get started with InfoSphere -9-

10 Streams and how to get started with BigInsights and how to load it, how to program it, how to play around with the stuff. At the end of the day, I mean, I can talk all day about Big Data, but, you know, where does the rubber meet the road? How do you actually use it, how do you get hands on? We will have these labs available at the event just to get people up and running and to let them taste a little bit of what Big Data can offer to them. Well, a lot of information there about how IBM is really offering some great opportunities for folks to wrap their arms around this topic. Lawrence, last question for you today. Where should I go for more information on Big Data? WEBER: So, number one, if you're not going to be at the conference, right, I mean, the thing is there's going to be so much there, I really suggest that everyone check out the conference and really experience the Big Data experience that we're bringing there. But if you can't go and you're listening and you want to get more information, we have created a site called the IBM bigdatahub.com, which the Big Data Hub brings together everything from IBM, not just marketing fluff that we have, -10-

11 but also real good hands-on experiences as well. From the Big Data Hub you can actually leverage Big Data University which is a number of courses and VMware images that you can go download Streams, download BigInsights and everything I've talked about so far and actually take courses and get yourself up and running with the latest and greatest technologies around Big Data. So the Big Data Hub is definitely the place to start your journey within Big Data. Well, thank you, Lawrence. A great overview on Big Data and how we can get connected at Innovate 2013 on issues around the topic. We sincerely appreciate you joining us today to share your expertise. WEBER: Hey, thanks so much. That was Lawrence Weber, Program Director Big Data Product Marketing for IBM, with some key points for today's special Innovate podcast event, Innovate 2013, Tackling Your Big Data Challenges at Innovate. I'd like to also remind our listeners to please visit our IBM Big Data Hub at ibmbigdatahub.com and to consider our Big Data University. To share this podcast with your colleagues or to register, check out the IBM Innovate 2013 homepage at -11-

12 ibm.com/innovate. This has been an IBM podcast. I'm your moderator, Kimberly Gist. Thank you for listening, and we hope that you will choose to keep tuning in as Rational Talks to You. IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] [END OF SEGMENT] -12-