Tuesday, July 2, 2013

On DEBS 2013: First keynote speaker - Roger Barga from Microsoft

Roger Barga has been an excellent choice (of the organizers) for first keynote in DEBS 2013.
He has a wide perspective from the multiple roles he occupied over the last few years in MSFT.   
Roger mentioned Thomas Kuhn's seminal work on the structure of revolutions - saying that there are two competing forces, those who push for paradigm shift and those who resist them and try to find "good enough" way to resolve everything in the old paradigm where they feel comfortable.   The use of event-driven thinking is just a paradigm shift, this is consistent with our tutorial given in the previous day.  
Some comments I took while listening to Roger:

1. Evolution of analytics:  analytics 1.0 - descriptive analytics based on warehouses, analytics 2.0 - big data, with NOSQL and Hadoop, we are going to analytics 3.0  -"rapid analytics with business impact".    Hadoop will become a niche technology, and real-time analytics (based on event processing) will take over. 
2. Some examples: Rols Royce is giving "engine up-time" as a service instead of selling aircraft engines, with a lot of instrumentation for maintaining the engines.  Other examples in the area of telemetry.  Some companies are making huge investments on real-time analytics.
3. Today there are two types of analytics: operational analytics  based on the speed of business, but use little information to get decisions;  investigative analytics based on the speed of  data scientists, and is based on a lot of information. There is a gap between the two that need to be unified.
4.  People don't know how to make use of new technologies to find new useful applications and tend to apply new technologies to old applications -- example: the first TV area was just visual radio, until the industry learned that TV opens new opportunity.
5. Bottom line: there are velocity pressure to do real-time analytics, but it requires paradigm shift and education.  Very compatible with our conclusions.   More about DEBS 2013 - later.

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