It's Not the Beast: It's the Herd

Friday, May 8, 2015 - 9:35 am

How and why do some emerging open source projects become winners, while others are relegated to the dust bin of history?

The big data open source movement is a mosaic from mainstream technologies like HDFS and MapReduce to maturing technologies like Spark and Storm to bleeding edge technologies. And there’s plenty to choose from: GitHub currently has over 9 million users collaborating across over 20 million repositories! So why do certain platforms bubble up into winners and earn mindshare from the open source community? Is it the Darwinian theory of evolution of the fittest or are there other forces at play?

This session will discuss the impact of third party companies and the open source ecosystem on the growth and maturation of platforms such as Spark, Storm, YARN, HBase, MongoDB, Presto, Phoenix and more. The presentation will examine the big data ecosystem of today with an emphasis on characteristics of winners vs. losers based on hands on experience, benchmarking and ecosystem support. Which open source projects are too hyped? Which ones are risky bets? And how can we predict what’s next in big data?

It's Not the Beast: It's the Herd - DataEDGE 2015

Ron Bodkin

Founder and President

Think Big, a Teradata company

Ron founded Think Big to help companies realize measurable value from Big Data. Think Big is the leading provider of independent consulting and integration services specifically focused on Big Data solutions. Their expertise spans all facets of data science and data engineering and helps their customers to drive maximum value from their Big Data initiative.

Previously, Ron was VP Engineering at Quantcast where he led the data science and engineer teams that pioneered the use of Hadoop and NoSQL for batch and real-time decision making. Prior to that, Ron was Founder of New Aspects, which provided enterprise consulting for Aspect-oriented programming. Ron was also Co-Founder and CTO of B2B applications provider C-Bridge, which he led a team of 900 people and a successful IPO. Ron graduated with honors from McGill University with a B.S. in Math and Computer Science. Ron also earned his Master’s Degree in Computer Science from MIT, leaving the PhD program after presenting the idea for C-bridge and placing in the finals of the 50k Entrepreneurship Contest.