Next week I’ll attend Strata + Hadoop World in London where we will present IBM Bluemix. Since this is a big data conference we’ll also demonstrate some ideas of IBM Emerging Technologies how the next generation of big data analytics could look like.
Below is a video from IBM fellow Rod Smith who presented some of these ideas at another conference at the end of last year. Next week Rod will give an update in his keynote and his breakout session.
“Big data and analytics continues to be a disruptive business force. Are we entering another phase – real-time digital business transformation, where businesses are realizing that the time to adjust to market and customer opportunities and threats is shrinking quickly? Leveraging historical and streaming data with ‘just-in-time’ analytics at the time of business decisions is on the horizon – and in the future machine learning will play an important role in automating many business actions and processes. All this is spurring huge innovation strides across the industry and open source communities.”
The key technologies used to implement this vision are Apache Spark, IPython Notebooks and some extensions from IBM. Spark supports accessing different types of data, from historical data to data streams, and through the fast in-memory processing it allows “just-in-time” analytics. IPhython notebooks are web-based IDEs that provide one unified place for teams to share insights, business, results, notes, etc. and they can be considered as the next generation of spreadsheets.
While IPhython notebooks are primarily tools for data scientists the demo in the video below takes it one step further to allow even line of business users to do data analytics, to collaborate easily with data scientists and to integrate the results in solutions.