Missing Perspectives in Big Data Industry

Missing Perspectives in Big Data Industry

I have been personally talking to a lot of people in the big data industry in many events I attend. For those who already know me I attend:

• On the average one event every day of the week
• Average one full day event every week
• Have also moderated few panels on big data in the recent months of 2012
• Attended few conference in the last few months ranging from 2 days to 4 days.

I have also interacted with big data industry leaders and professionals. I have talked to companies in this industry to include those who focus on:

• Developing and Supporting Big Data Platforms - Either they offer standard open source Hadoop or rewrite some codes. We all hear Hadoop and its close cousins. Other big data platforms with totally innovative approaches are yet to be born.
  
• Consulting companies, SMB and Large - Most are nothing more than job shop companies, with no big data strategy, other than hiring a lot of fresh graduates from university and college campus in USA and BRICS countries, offer them regurgitated courses while they are on "bench" and waiting for American and EU companies asking for big data programmers. Many of these large companies have the same business model for over 3 to 4 decades. Hire cheap Indian (or other countries) graduates, mostly programmers, pay them local Indian rates, while they charge American or EU rates to the respective customers. They rake billions of dollars. They just do not believe in innovation, new technology development or product development. The leadership does not understand big data strategy.
• At least, the Chinese are presenting challenging products in software, web based products and services and significantly in hardware products in computing, telecom, wireless, mobile and consumer electronics.
• Big Data Scientists and Companies in Big Data Science
• Companies Specializing in Big Data Visualization hiring a lot of fresh graduates from university and college campus

This is the problem I am seeing: People are either familiar with server design at hardware level, or those who do big data are mostly Hadoop software types or data scientists.
In all my efforts, I have not found those who are knowledgeable in the intersection of how big data will create special supply chain demands and performance demands in not only servers, but also data centers and the components that go into them like processors, Solid State Memories (SSD) memories.

Additionally, there will be similar demands in networking, latency, cost etc.

Hardware supply chain can not scale up as fast as the software aspect of big data. Infrastructure building will have definite push back on big data growth.

Another important issue for big data to happen as much as we all want, knowing all the benefits of big data power, is the training of the professionals and experience to do hardware, software and networking.

The number of professionals in hardware, software and networking plus data science to derive the benefit of big data is very big, much more than the supply of graduating engineers and computer scientists, those professionals already in the work force or unemployed to be adequately trained. If all verticals, markets and companies in these were to embrace big data paradigm, the demand is many times the supply in USA, and similar supply - demand imbalance in EU and the BRICS countries.

I have even tried to discuss briefly to do the litmus test among the attendees and even the Key Note speakers types in conferences like Flash Memory Summit, ATCA Summit, video game conferences, other events in Silicon Valley area to check out if they are even thinking of in these lines I listed above. I have personally talked to big data company CEO and CTO levels. I have tried similar discussions with the Indian and American consulting companies who claim that big data practice. They are not even thinking deep enough or have enough mind share to be prepared to address the problem.

I will prepare my own presentation to address these topics. I plan to do the following sections in my presentation:

• State of the Industry
• Demand pull from Big Data
• Some Industry Verticals and Market Examples
• Potential push back from the different supply chain - processors, memory, servers, data centers, networking, cloud scale up, talent in different aspects of big data
• Highly critical issues to include security and privacy
• Quick provisioning, service assurance (SLA)
• Pricing Strategy and Price Elasticity for Big Data as a Service (BDAAS)
  
• Capital intensity issues for manufacturing infrastructure for the processors, memory, servers, data centers, networking
• Play out scenarios
• Murthy's Recommendations for the Industries and the aspiring nations: USA, EU Countries and BRICS countries.
• Additional Topics: Missing Perspectives and Initiatives in current Big Data thought leaders.

 Feel free to contact me if you need corporate advice, a Key Note Speaker or a panel moderator:

bigdataexpert@gmail.com