Big Data solutions, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Cassandra, are growing up and are in the process of moving out of a grassroots movement to widespread adoption. Unfortunately, the majority of the technical expertise still lies in the hands of the open source project contributors and most solutions are tackled from the bottom up, starting with the technical problems. The collateral that is presently available is largely from the social media giants that tout solutions built using 10,000 node clusters that process petabytes of data a day. The reality? The average person just cannot relate or intuitively draw parallels to their own business problems. While Big Data solutions are worthwhile far before you reach petabyte scale data, just getting started can be a challenge in itself. New open source projects are being regularly released that tackle a variety of issues related to Big Data, some of which are just slightly different to existing technologies. Just how does one navigate the plethora of technologies to design workable solutions to business problems? What if you only have gigabytes or terabytes of "medium" data on a small cluster? This panel features Solution Architects from a variety of key companies in the Big Data space which will provide deep dive technical discussions on real solutions we've employed for our customers, across a variety of industries, starting with the business problems.
Eric is a part of Cloudera's professional services team which works with customers to design and build systems around Apache Hadoop. Focused on data ingestion and processing systems, Eric regularly contributes to various open source projects.
Flip is the Founder and CTO of Infochimps, a data marketplace to find any data-set in the world. He holds a B.S. in Physics and Computer Science from Cornell University and attended graduate school in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. Flip enjoys riding his bicycle around Austin, eating homemade soup, and playing extreme Scrabble. The idea for Infochimps was inspired by Flip’s abhorrence of redundancy and desire to make the world a happier place for data lovers of all kinds.
Matt is CEO and co-founder at DataStax (formerly Riptano), the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra™. Prior to DataStax, Matt built and managed the Email and Apps infrastructure development group at Rackspace. Prior to Rackspace, Matt was at Webmail.us where he worked in various management roles in infrastructure and scalability. Matt holds a BS from Virginia Tech in Computer Science.
Steve Watt works on Hadoop Strategy, Architecture and Evangelism at HP in Austin, Texas. He is an Apache contributor, active in Open Source and chairs the Austin Big Data User Group. Prior to working for HP, he spent 10 years at IBM Emerging Technologies, several years consulting in the Middle East and working for startups in the United States and his native South Africa.
A software developer keen to tackle big data and scaling challenges in the database space, Stu is having a ball working on Twitter's deployments of Cassandra, and is excited to be helping to make order-of-magnitude larger datasets easier to work with. Related areas of interest include search and analytical processing, including Hadoop.
