News that are going on in the world of Cloud Computing and Big Data

Mario Meir-Huber
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International Data Science Conference, Salzburg

Hi,
I am happy to share this exciting conference I am keynoting at. Also, Mike Ohlsen from Cloudera will deliver a keynote at the conference.
About the conference:
June 12th – 13th 2017 | Salzburg, Austria | www.idsc.at
The 1st International Data Science Conference (iDSC 2017) organized by Salzburg University of Applied Sciences (Information Technology and Systems Management) in cooperation with Information Professionals GmbH seeks to establish a key Data Science event, providing a forum for an international exchange on Data Science technologies and applications.
The International Data Science Conference gives the participants the opportunity, over the course of two days, to delve into the most current research and up-to-date practice in Data Science and data-driven business. Besides the two parallel tracks, the Research Track and the Industry Track, on the second day a Symposium is taking place presenting the outcomes of a European Project on Text and Data Mining (TDM). These events are open to all participants.
Also we are proud to announce keynote presentations from Mike Olson (Chief Strategy Officer Cloudera), Ralf Klinkenberg (General Manager RapidMiner), Euro Beinat (Data-Science Professor and Managing Director CS Research), Mario Meir-Huber (Big Data Architect Microsoft). These keynotes will be distributed over both conference days, providing times for all participants to come together and share views on challenges and trends in Data Science.
The Research Track offers a series of short presentations from Data Science researchers on their own, current papers. On both conference days, we are planning a morning and an afternoon session presenting the results of innovative research into data mining, machine learning, data management and the entire spectrum of Data Science.
The Industry Track showcases real practitioners of data-driven business and how they use Data Science to help achieve organizational goals. Though not restricted to these topics only, the industry talks will concentrate on our broad focus areas of manufacturing, retail and social good. Users of data technologies can meet with peers and exchange ideas and solutions to the practical challenges of data-driven business.
Futhermore the Symposium is organized in collaboration with the FutureTDM Consortium. FutureTDM is a European project which over the last two years has been identifying the legal and technical barriers, as well as the skills stakeholders/practitioners lack, that inhibit the uptake of text and data mining for researchers and innovative businesses. The recommendations and guidelines recognized and proposed to counterbalance these barriers, so as to ensure broader TDM uptake and thus boost Europe’s research and innovation capacities, will be the focus of the Symposium.
Our sponsors Cloudera, F&F and um etc. will have their own, special platform: half-day workshops to provide hands-on interaction with tools or to learn approaches to developing concrete solutions. In addition, there will be an exhibition of the sponsors’ products and services throughout the conference, with the opportunity for the participants to seek contact and advice.
The iDSC 2017 is therefore a unique meeting place for researchers, business managers, and data scientists to discover novel approaches and to share solutions to the challenges of a data-driven world.

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Mario Meir-Huber
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My Big Data predictions for 2016

As 2016 is around the corner, the question is what this year will bring for Big Data. Here are my top assumptions for the year to come:

  • The growth for relational databases will slow down, as more companies will evaluate Hadoop as an alternative to classic rdbms
  • The Hadoop stack will get more complicated, as more and more projects are added. It will almost take a team to understand what each of these projects does
  • Spark will lead the market for handling data. It will change the entire ecosystem again.
  • Cloud vendors will add more and more capability to their solutions to deal with the increasing demand for workloads in the cloud
  • We will see a dramatic increase of successful use-cases with Hadoop, as the first projects come to a successful end

What do you think about my predictions? Do you agree or disagree?

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Big Data Europe Meetup in Vienna, 15th of December

On the 15th of December, a Big Data Meetup will take place in Vienna, with leading personals from Fraunhofer, Rapidminer, Teradata et al.
About the Meetup:

The growing digitization and networking process within our society has a large influence on all aspects of everyday life. Large amounts of data are being produced permanently, and when these are analyzed and interlinked they have the potential to create new knowledge and intelligent solutions for economy and society. Big Data can make important contributions to the technical progress in our societal key sectors and help shape business. What is needed are innovative technologies, strategies and competencies for the beneficial use of Big Data to address societal needs.

Climate, Energy, Food, Health, Transport, Security, and Social Sciences – are the most important societal challenges tackled by the European Union within the new research and innovation framework program “Horizon 2020”. In every one of these fields, the processing, analysis and integration of large amounts of data plays a growing role – such as the analysis of medical data, the decentralized supply with renewable energies or the optimization of traffic flow in large cities.

Big Data Europe (BDE, http://www.big-data-europe.eu) will undertake the foundational work for enabling European companies to build innovative multilingual products and services based on semantically interoperable, large-scale, multi-lingual data assets and knowledge, available under a variety of licenses and business models

On 14-15 December 2015 the whole BDE team is meeting in Vienna for a project plenary and thereby around 35 experts in the topic will be participating in the Big Data Europe MeetUp on 15 December 2015 at the Impact Hub Vienna to discuss challenges and requirements and proven solutions for big data management together with the audience.

Agenda
16:00 – 16:10, Welcome & the BDE MeetUp, Vienna – Martin Kaltenböck (SWC)
16:10 – 16:30, The Big Data Europe Project
Sören Auer (Fraunhofer IAIS, BDE Project Lead)
16:30 – 16:45, Big Data Management Models (e.g. RACE)
Mario Meir-Huber (Big Data Lead CEE, Teradata, Vienna – Austria)
16:45 – 17:00, Selected Big Data Projects in Budapest & above,

Zoltan C Toth (Senior Big Data Engineer RapidMiner Inc., Budapest – Hungary)
17:00 – 17:30 Open Discussion with the Panel on Big Data Requirements, Challenges and Solutions.
17:30 – 19:00 Networking & Drinks
Remark: 19:00/30 end of event…

Register here or here.

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Mario Meir-Huber
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RACEing to agile Big Data Analytics

I am happy to announce the development we did over the last month within Teradata. We developed a light-weight process model for Big Data Analytic projects, which is called “RACE”. The model is agile and resembles the know-how of more than 25 consultants that worked in over 50 Big Data Analytic projects in the recent month. Teradata also developed CRISP-DM, the industry leading process for data mining. Now we invented a new process for agile projects that addresses the new challenges of Big Data Analytics.
Where does the ROI comes from?
This was one of the key questions we addressed when developing RACE. The economics of Big Data Discovery Analytics are different to traditional Integrated Data Warehousing economics. ROI comes from discovering insights in highly iterative projects run over very short time periods (4 to 8 weeks usually) Each meaningful insight or successful use case that can be actioned generates ROI. The total ROI is a sum of all the successful use cases. Competitive Advantage is therefore driven by the capability to produce both a high volume of insights as well as creative insights that generate a high ROI.
What is the purpose of RACE?
RACE is built to deliver a high volume of use cases, focusing on speed and efficiency of production. It fuses data science, business knowledge & creativity to produce high ROI insights
How does the process look like?

RACE - an agile process for Big Data Analytic Projects

RACE – an agile process for Big Data Analytic Projects


The process itself is divided into several short phases:

  • Roadmap.That’s an optional first step (but heavily recommended) to built a roadmap on where the customer wants to go in terms of Big Data.
  • Align. Use-cases are detailed and data is confirmed.
  • Create. Data is loaded, prepared and analyzed. Models are developed
  • Evaluate. Recommendations for the business are given

In the next couple of weeks we will publish much more on RACE, so stay tuned!

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Amazon's Cloud Business growing fast, creating surplus

Amazon announced details about their Q2 earnings yesterday. Their cloud business grew with incredible 81%. This is massive, given the fact that Amazon is already the number #1 company in that area. This quarter, they earned 1.8 billion USD from cloud computing.
Summing up this number, their revenue would definitively reach some 7 billion this year. However, if this growth continues to increase so fast, I guess they could even get double-digit by the end of this year. Will Amazon reach 10 billion in 2015? If so, this would be incredible! Microsoft stated that their growth was somewhere well above the 100% mark, so I am interested in where Microsoft will stand by the end of the year.
But what does this tell us? Both Microsoft and Amazon are growing fast in this business and we can expect that we will see many more interesting services in the coming month and years in the Cloud. My opinion is that the market is already consolidated between Microsoft and Amazon. Other companies such as Google and Oracle are rather niche players in the Cloud market.

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Mario Meir-Huber

Goodbye IDC, Hello Teradata!

With July 1st, I’ve decided to change my professional career and change to Teradata. I will work as the Big Data Leader for CEE, developing the Business in the region. It is a major career step for me. In the upcoming years, I will work closely with our teams in the region to built great Big Data applications.

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Mario Meir-Huber

CloudVane once again rated among the Top Blogs!

I am happy that my Blog, CloudVane, once again received a great honor: the UK based consultancy company named CloudVane as one of the Top blogs on Cloud Computing and Big Data! Thanks for that!! It is a great honor to be named next to sites like InfoWorld and ReadWrite!
CloudVane continues success in the online world 😉 Stay tuned for more great articles! If you haven’t subscribed to the Blog yet (and now you should definitely do that ;)) Feel free to do so here.
And finally, here is the link to the nomination.

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Mario Meir-Huber
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E-Book on Big Data for Free! ONLY until Sunday

The 70-pages E-Book on Big Data is for free until Sunday on Amazon! This ebook is available exclusively for Amazon Kindle.
More information about the E-Book can be found here.
You can find the E-Book on Amazon here.

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Mario Meir-Huber
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Privacy killed the Big Data star

Big Data is all about limiting our privacy. With Big Data, we get no privacy at all. Hello, Big Brother is watching us and we have to stop it right now!
Well, this is far too cruel. Big Data is NOT all about limiting our privacy. Just to make it clear: I see the benefits of Big Data. However, there are a lot of people out there that are afraid of Big Data because of privacy. The thing I want to state first: Big Data is not NSA, Privacy, Facebook or whatever surveillance technology you can think of. Of course, it is often enabled by Big Data technologies. I see this discussion often and I recently came across an event, that stated stated that Big Data is bad and it limits our privacy. I say, this is bullsh##.
The event I am talking about stated that Big Data is bad, it is limiting our privacy and it needs to be stopped. It is a statement that only sees one side of the topic. I agree that the continuous monitoring of people by secret services isn’t great and we need to do something about it. But this is not Big Data. I agree that Facebook is limiting my privacy. I significantly reduced the amount of time spending on Facebook and don’t use the mobile Apps. This needs to change.
However, this not Big Data. This are companies/organisations doing something that is not ok. Big Data is much more than that. Big Data is not just evil, it is great for many aspects:

  • Big Data in healthcare can save thousands, if not millions of lives by improving medicine, vaccination and finding correlations for chronically ill people to improve their treatment. Nowadays, we can decode the DNA in short time, which helps a lot of people!
  • Big Data in agriculture can improve how we produce foods. Since the global population is growing, we need to get more productive in order to feed everyone.
  • Big Data can improve the stability and reliability of IT systems by providing real-time analytics. Logs are analysed in real-time to react to incidents before they happen.
  • Big Data can – and actually does – improve the reliability of devices and machines. An example is that of medicine devices. A company in this field could reduce the time the devices had an outage from weeks to only hours! This does not just save money, it also saves lives!
  • There are many other use-cases in that field, where Big Data is great

We need to start to work together instead of just calling something bad because it seems to be so. No technology is good or evil, there are always some bad things but also some good things. It is necessary to see all sides of a technology. The conference I was talking about gave me the inspiration to write this article as it is so small-minded.

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Mario Meir-Huber

BREAKING NEWS: New AWS Region in Germany, Frankfurt

Amazon Web Services today announced their new Datacenter for Germany, Frankfurt. This is AWS region number 11 and the second in Europe. AWS will support a large number of services from that datacenter.
Here is the original press release:

SEATTLE—Oct, 23, 2014– (NASDAQ:AMZN) — Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of its new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, which is the 11th technology infrastructure region globally for AWS and the second region in the European Union (EU), joining the AWS EU (Ireland) region. All customers can now leverage AWS to build their businesses and run applications on infrastructure located in Germany. As with every AWS region, customers can do this knowing that their content will stay within the region they choose. The newly launched AWS EU (Frankfurt) region comes as a result of the rapid growth AWS has been experiencing and is available now for any business, organization or software developer to sign up and get started at: http://aws.amazon.com.

All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet rigorous compliance standards including, ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), PCI DSS Level 1, and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. AWS is fully compliant with all applicable EU Data Protection laws, and for customers that require it, AWS provides data processing agreements to help customers comply with EU data protection requirements. More information on how customers using AWS can meet EU data protection requirements and local certifications such as BSI IT Grundschutz, can be found on the AWS Data Protection webpage at: aws.amazon.com/de/data-protection. A full list of compliance certifications can be found on the AWS compliance webpage at: http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/.

The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. For customers looking for inter-region redundancy, the new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, in conjunction with the AWS EU (Ireland) region, gives them flexibility to architect across multiple AWS regions within the EU.

“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”

Many German customers are already using AWS including Talanx, in the highly regulated insurance sector. Talanx is one of the top three largest insurers in Germany and one of the largest insurance companies in the world with over €28 billion in premium income in 2013. “For Talanx, like many companies that hold sensitive customer data, data privacy is paramount,” says Achim Heidebrecht, Head of Group IT, Talanx AG. “Using AWS we are already seeing a 75% reduction in calculation time, and €8 million in annual savings, when running our Solvency II simulations while still complying with our very strict data policies. With the launch of the AWS region on German soil, we will now move even more of our sensitive and mission critical workloads to AWS.”

Hubert Burda Media is one of the largest media companies in Europe with over 400 brands and revenues in excess of $3.6 billion. JP Schmetz, Chief Scientist of Hubert Burda Media said of the announcement, “Now that AWS is available in Germany it gives our subsidiaries the option to move certain assets to the cloud. We have long had policies preventing data to be hosted outside of German soil and this new German region gives us the option to use AWS more meaningfully.”

Academics in Germany were also quick to welcome the new region, “The arrival of an Amazon Web Services Region in Germany marks an important occasion for the German business and technology community,” said Prof. Dr Helmut Krcmar, Vice Dean of the Computer Science Faculty, and Chair of Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich. “We work with a number of DAX listed companies in Germany. Many have been holding off moving sensitive workloads to the cloud until they had computing and service facilities on German soil as this could help them comply with their internal processes. This new region from AWS answers this and we expect to see innovation amongst Germany, and Europe’s, companies flourish as a result.”

The Header Image was published by Martin aka Maha under the Creative Commons License.

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