Your daily digest of “All Things Big Data” gathered, collected and researched by your very own 10Fold Big Data Practice team.
Big Data
Data scientists are in high demand, and at the same time they are in short supply. This is due to data science being a relatively new field, and universities are only just starting their own programs to train up a new generation of big data experts. Because of this high demand, good data scientists command high salaries, and bringing a full time data scientist on at a small business with a low budget simply isn’t a choice. However, there has been a shift to using freelance data scientist. Instead of hiring full time data science professionals to oversee all big data projects within an organization, the company instead hires on a per project basis. This is especially important for smaller businesses, since the time between big data projects at that level can often be lengthy. Passing over the full time option means a business wouldn’t have to worry about paying a big data expert when they have nothing for them to do. This added flexibility also leads to choosing data experts based off of their individual talents. For example, if a big data project requires hiring a data scientist with expertise in sales, the small business can do so. Their fees aren’t based off of a salary but rather on the milestones reached in the project.
According to VentureBeat, Attivio raised $31 million to help companies make sense of big data. The Massachusetts-based startup promises to “accelerate data discovery,” which they announced today when they closed the $31 million deal. The investment will help the company meet investors’ expectation of turning profitable “later this year.” Oak Investment Partners invested in Attivio and had this to say, “Our increased investment underscores our belief that Attivio has game-changing capabilities for enterprises that have yet to unlock the full value of Big Data.” This is a big year for Attivio, who also highlighted such recent business victories as landing lab equipment maker Thermo Fisher Scientific as a client and partnering with medical informatics shop PerkinElmer.
The Benefits of Hiring Freelance Big Data Experts – Smart Data Collective
Attivio Raises $31 Million to Help Companies Make Sense of Big Data – VentureBeat
Hadoop
The global Hadoop market is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 53% over the next four years. Several factors such as data explosion in enterprises and demand for cost-effective solutions to meet big data analytics needs contribute to the growth of this market. However, the market is witnessing a lack of trained and talented technical experts. Companies are unaware of the technologies concerned and skills required for managing big data. As per the forecast, this market will witness a gradual shift towards Software as a Service (SaaS)-based Hadoop solutions as it helps enterprises save cost and gain a better user experience.
Global Hadoop Market 2015 – Industry Analysis, Shares, Size, Research, and Forecast to 2019 – Digital Journal
IoT
IoT is progressively gaining momentum throughout the Middle East and Africa (MEA). This is helping the Middle East due to the continuous drop in oil prices, which is causing governments and businesses to cut their spending budgets. Despite these new restrictions, MEA governments and businesses are looking to diversify their investments into long-term smart technology initiatives that will help enhance their competitive advantage and improve their levels of customer satisfaction. This objective has meant that IoT spending has been largely resilient to the growing budget cuts currently sweeping across other areas of the economy.
Consequently, a number of countries in the MEA region are being challenged to meet growing demands for power in order to facilitate the expansion of various business sectors. At the same time, the advocacy surrounding sustainable and clean energy today is spurring growth in smart utilities investments. As a result, the country is seeing an increase in the deployment of so-called Smart Grids (both for electricity and gas) due to the energy management improvements that they provide. Such investments will see IoT spending related to utilities in MEA increase 14 percent year over year in 2016 to total $647.94 million.
According to “The Future is Connected” report from SITA – the leading global IT provider to the air transport industry – 83 percent of air travel passengers have smartphones, which allows the unifying technology to provide a connected end-to-end experience. “Half of airlines expect to have IoT initiatives up and running over the next three years. Meanwhile, airports are building the infrastructure to support IoT. Together, this will deliver improved operations and will lead to a change in the passengers’ experience,” said Nigel Pickford, director Market Insight, SITA. Smartphones are reshaping travel behavior and with growth rates of around 80 percent or more at the check-in and boarding pass stages, it is clear that air travelers are keen to use this unifying technology.
According to The Economist, sensor-filled “beans,” developed by Andrew Holland, an electronics engineer from Swaffham Bulbeck, could provide an answer to many a farmer’s prayers. Mixed into the contents of the beans are sensors that help report continuously on the temperature and humidity (both of which encourage rotting if they are too high) and on carbon-dioxide levels, which reflect the amount of insect breath exhaled, and thus the level of infestation. If the beans do well at monitoring grain, Holland hopes their other applications will make them an important part of the much-discussed IoT. Ultimately, some believe these beans will help link many things (such as food crops) not currently connected electronically.
‘Internet of Things’ to Transform Air Travel Experience Globally: Report – Zee News India
Cool Beans – The Economist
IIoT
Bosch is working together with partners to combine the technical standards of Germany’s “Industrie 4.0” platform and of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) for the first time. This is concerning many people, because if all the energy-intensive machinery in Bosch’s Homburg plant runs at the same time, it can potentially lead to very high electricity consumption at peak times. As a result,the increase in electricity pushes up the cost of manufacturing the hydraulic valves. By using software to manage production and electricity consumption as effectively as possible, energy demand can be optimized and peak loads reduced by up to ten percent. The partners combine their expertise to optimize energy consumption at the plant. Bosch continuously collects data from all the machinery in the plant, generating a stream of information about the electricity consumed in the process of manufacturing the hydraulic valves for agricultural machinery.
Bosch combines “Industrie 4.0” platform and Industrial Internet Consortium standards for the first time – Automotive World
eCommerce
UK-based, B2B ecommerce software company, On Demand Solutions, has now launched an ecommerce software solution for B2C retailers. The new solution focuses especially on small and medium-sized companies, and has omni-channel functionality. Additional features allow smaller ecommerce players a responsive online storefront, and ability to control multiple webstores through one CMS, enabling clients to sell their products through multiple marketplaces. Features of these webstores include social media links, intergration with MailChimp, product reviews, vouchers, best-selling items and integration with Google Adwords, Amazon and Ebay. It also integrates with ERP back office software including SAP Enterprise, SAP Business One, Sage 200, Sage 1000 and Astute.
ODSNet launches B2C ecommerce software solution – Ecommerce News UK
Software Defined Networks
Yesterday, Microsoft announced it is giving away free software it designed for its own internal use called Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC). SONiC is software used to run software defined networking, which threatens to overturn Cisco’s stranglehold on the network switch industry. SDN takes features that an expensive switch offers and puts them into software, making networks easier to program, update and change. Microsoft is giving SONiC software away as part of its work with the Open Compute Project (OCP), an organization founded by Facebook to build open source hardware for data centers the same way that the people behind the Linux operating system do with free, open source software. The two big companies that are not working with SONiC are VMware and Cisco – which could mean trouble for them in the future.
Microsoft just joined Facebook and fired a huge shot at Cisco – Business Insider