Your daily digest of “All Things Big Data” gathered, collected and researched by your very own 10Fold Big Data Practice team.
Big Data
The Huffington Post compared the massive onslaught of data coming from digital sources to the Gold Rush, noting that as a result of this ever-expanding abundance of data, big data is increasingly the focus at most companies. International Data Corporation estimates that spending on big data technology and services will hit $125 billion in 2015, and is likely to experience double-digit growth for several years to come. Currently, firms are overwhelmed by the “big” in big data, and searching for ways to focus on “smart” data with tangible results.
China’s Alibaba Group Holding Limited is stepping up its efforts to take on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the cloud with new multi-billion dollar partnership with Nvidia Corp. that will see Alibaba’s AliCloud adopt Nvidia’s chips to run the new services. While AWS and Microsoft are unlikely to be concerned yet, they will surely start keeping tabs on AliCloud.
Syncsort, 250 prominent respondents including data architects, IT managers, developers, business intelligence and data analysts were surveyed by big data services provider, Syncsort, on big data trends to watch in 2016. The three biggest trends are: Apache Spark production deployments, Conversion from other platforms to Hadoop, and Leveraging Hadoop for advanced use cases.
The Big Data Gold Rush: Will Wall Street Be Left Behind? – Huffington Post
Nvidia to power AliCloud’s new Deep Learning and Big Data services – SiliconANGLE
New Hadoop survey makes big data predictions for 2016 – ZD Net
Hadoop
A new report by Forrester Research’s big data analysts say that adopting Hadoop is mandatory for any organization that wishes to do advanced analytics and get actionable insights on their data. With an estimated 60 % to 73% of enterprises’ data going unused for business intelligence and analytics, Forrester predicts that as many application developers and delivery professionals are already adopting Hadoop “en masse,” Hadoop adoption by large enterprises will eventually reach 100%. The research and analyst firm included Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR among the top tier vendors of Hadoop software, with IBM and Pivotal rounding out Forrester’s top five picks.
The top 5 Hadoop distributions, according to Forrester – Network World
IoT
RCR Wireless News examines the relationship between LTE and the Internet of Things, noting that IoT is not really one-size fits all. Because of this, LTE categorizes data rate transmissions by uplink and downlink speed (Category 0 caps both uplink and downlink at 1 megabit per second; Category 1 caps uplink speeds at 5.2 Mbps and downlink speeds at 10.3 Mbps). The article goes on to report that 3GPP is working on standards for three new cellular IoT technologies, and Nokia, Ericsson and Intel are working together to develop and bring to market the products needed for the commercialization of NB-IoT.
LTE and IoT – RCR Wireless
Advanced Analytics
With assistance from Accenture, the U.S. Food and Nutrition Services has turned to advanced analytics software from SAS to spot possible fraud, such as trafficking Electronic Benefit cards and skimming cash, which typically occurs at smaller urban and rural stores. The agency’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) has stepped up efforts to root out abusers by focusing on stores and individuals engaged in such fraudulent activity by sifting through tens of thousands of transactions per month and data mining them for patterns. Once abusers are caught, the FNS dispenses penalties ranging from a 12-month disqualification to permanent exclusion from the program, depending on the severity of the violation. Individuals can also receive penalties, including a loss of benefits.
USDA Uses Advanced Analytics to Fight Fraud – Baseline
Personalization
Growth marketing and user engagement platform, Iterable announced it has closed a $9.2 million Series A round of funding to help close the personalization gap between what consumers want and what marketers can deliver. Research shows that personalization has a high return on investment, which brings a big opportunity to vendors to reach consumers, however 80% of consumer-facing companies don’t understand their customers beyond basic demographics and purchase history. With its new funding, Iterable also plans to accelerate growth, extend the functionality of its platform, and grow its team.
Iterable raises $8M to help marketers bridge the personalization gap – Venture Beat
OpenStack
A report issued by the OpenStack Foundation, “Accelerating NFV Delivery with OpenStack,” makes a case for using OpenStack to replace the costly, proprietary hardware often employed with NFV, both inside and outside of telecoms. The paper also shows how many telecom-specific NFV features — such as support for multiple IPv6 prefixes — are being requested or submitted by telecoms that are OpenStack users. The survey also lists network function virtualization as the second-largest OpenStack technology. To that end, even if OpenStack is a major force in NFV, the question is whether enterprises interested in NFV/SDN will adopt OpenStack as their solution.
OpenStack digs for deeper value in telecoms, network virtualization – Info World