Big Data forum by techcircle.in

Big Data Forum
Big Data Forum Bangalore

 

By Ganapathi Devappa,

I attended the Big data Forum in Bangalore conducted by tech circle on Thursday August 7, 2014. It was a good opportunity to listen to as many as 30 speakers on six different panels. In addition, I could speak to twenty other participants who were either Big Data consultants or startups.

Big Data Panels

The event started with the first panel of investors like IDG and Accel and tech biggies such as IBM. It stressed upon the market for big data and the importance of domain expertise and focus. Asheet Makhija from IBM stressed upon Big Data opportunities in verticals such as Telectom, Banking, Media and Government. He also expressed importance of machine to machine communication. Accel stressed upon non-India focus for revenue and creating a global platform where as IDG was open to all ventures. All of them stressed upon the mobile handset as a vehicle for providing ultra-personalized information.

Next there was interview with Mr.Dhiraj Rajaram, founder, CEO & Chairman of Mu Sigma. He is quite an eccentric person with views contradictory to earlier panelists. He felt there was too much noise in internet Big Data and it was very difficult to separate signal from noise. He was of the view that expertise is not important and learning was better than knowledge. Also companies should not fear the cost of experimentation and need to constantly experiment. He also felt IP will die and companies will combine things not combined before creating a mixture. Data engineering, data science and behavior science will come together. Scalability depends on agility and flexibility. He wants to encourage better art of problem solving through encouraging curiosity and inquisitiveness.

The panel on ‘What will be the next frontier of growth for Big Data companies’ consisted of industrial biggies like Dinesh Pillai from Novartis and Ashish Singru from Ebay. It concentrated on future use cases for Big data. They stressed upon bio research and security. They also agreed that speed was more important than accuracy and gave examples of password hacking at Ebay.

Next panel consisted of analysts from retail space including Amitabh Mishra from Snap Deal and Bijael Jayaraj from Loylty rewards and discussed about Big Data opportunities in retail and consumer market. They spoke about   checking internal data as well as data from social networking sites. The recommendation engine was very helpful for them. Also Ebay benefited from analysis of social networking data to improve their customer experience.

The panel on Internet of things and Big data was moderated by Arihant Patni and included Lany Thangiah of Siemens, Krishnan Raman from Flutura and Apurva Shetty from SenseGiz. They talked about analyzing sensor data and making decisions that can have safety and life implications. Krishnan Raman gave examples from oil rigs where there are sensors every where and one wrong move can shutdown the entire oil rig causing millions of dollars in damage. Providing all this data and analysis through mobile devices and internet allows remote monitoring and control.

Next panel talked about social media and aptly included panelists Bhupendra Khanal from Simplify 360 and Karthik Bettadapura from DataWeave and Amit Soni from General Atlantic. They discussed how social media analytics was changing the way people acquire new customers and also how even Indian elections were fought in the social media. Going forward, social media will be an important area for marketing effort of organizations.

The last session I attended included the panel on monetizing, implementing and scaling Big Data. It included Sunil Gupta from Netmagic, N Vishwanathan from L&T Infotech and Tarun Krishnamurthy from Mcafee. Unfortunately they didn’t talk much about monetizing and talked more about technology (like Hadoop, Storm, Hive) and scaling Big Data using cloud platforms.

Other Big Data Startups

I also talked to:

  • Mr.Shreyas Desai, co-founder of HurricaneViz
    •   They have created a data analytics platform of the same name
  • Mr.Deepak Jain from Mumbai, senior advisor at Lastaki
    • providing business advisory
    • providing  M&A consultancy,
  • Mr. Durga Prakash from Hyderabad, co-founder and CEO of Diggit IOT business solutions
    •   They have a framework for analytics on mobile platform
  • Many other start-ups and consultants.

Overall it was a good conference providing lot of insight into what is happening in India in the Big Data space and what one can expect in the near future.

About the Author

Author
Author

Ganapathi is an expert in data and databases. He has been managing database projects for many years and now is consulting clients on Big Data implementations. He is a Cloudera certified Hadoop administrator and also a Sybase certified database administrator. He has worked with clients in US, UK, Australia, Japan and India on many large projects. He has helped in implementing large database projects in Sybase, Oracle, Informix, DB2, MySQL and recently SAPHANA. He has been using big data technologies like Apache Hadoop and SAP HANA and has been providing strategies for dealing with large databases and performance issues. He is based out of Bangalore, India. He can be reached at ganapathid@spideropsnet.com.

6 thoughts on “Big Data forum by techcircle.in”

  1. Insightful information on the proceedings @ Tech-circle. While it is good that there are forums that bring together people on the technology front, it would be of interest to also get business users to talk about the benefits they derived by leveraging projects on #BigData. The skepticism that could perhaps exist in the minds of some of the early adopters or fence-sitters could be due to the precedence that technology driven solutions have created – the initial hype versus the potential reality. Though much of this – the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip, could be due to the manner in which projects get defined and executed, expecting a silver bullet to an existing problem may not be the right approach to any new technology. Perhaps it is too early for some of the early adopters to share data on BigData, as that may put their competition on notice, thereby depriving them of the early-mover-advantage. Fair enough. In the interest of attracting more people to explore the capabilities inherent in #BigData and the products that support it, it would be helpful for technology companies involved in implementation to provide client agnostic data to prove the efficacy of using such tools. This would surely buttress the case for early adoption as well as assuage the critics.

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