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Thought Leadership

Getting Real with Big Data in 2014: Celebrating 20 Editions of the Big Data Meet Up

Steven Noels / January 27, 2014

2014 is going to be the year that businesses get real with big data. This was the topic and overall consensus at last week’s Big Data Meet Up in Gent, Belgium. Marking the 20th edition of the meet up, NGDATA partnered with the bigdata.be community to bring together data practitioners, software engineers, data scientists, venture capitalists, and more to discuss and debate what is thriving in the Belgian big data community.

With more than 550 members, we’re excited at the enthusiasm and innovation happening in the region. Here are a few reasons why.

Booming Technology Innovation
As part of the Big Data Meet Up, companies are invited to present—or pitch, if you will—their respective company’s business objective and solutions in front of an audience of experienced data practitioners. One of the most exciting portions of the event, we heard from a range of exciting data companies, including:

  • BigBoards (development cluster on your desktop)
  • Conundra (optimization methods consultancy)
  • Datablend (data scientism consultancy)
  • Datylon (data visualization and print customization)
  • McKinsey (advisors and consultancy)
  • ThinkData (data scientism consultancy)
  • Trackuity (data startup on tracking)

Big data is a busy market, but what struck us most about these companies is the confidence behind the solutions they’re developing and delivering— solving real business issues across several industries. No longer does a ‘one size fits all’ data infrastructure work for today’s businesses. The presentations at the Big Data Meet Up illustrated the importance of delivering solutions that address companies’ specific needs—i.e. tailoring marketing campaigns to customers’ preferences, reducing customer churn, analyzing data trends, forecasting, and more.

In addition to companies pitching their goods, the crowd was also offered a number of project and/or case presentations, including:

  • Optaplanner (planning optimization algorithm)
  • Telenet (big data infrastructure)
  • WK1 (prediction accuracy model)

Data Scientist Is [Still] the Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
As we all know, Harvard Business Review declared the data scientist as the “sexiest job” of the 21st century. This declaration spurred a frenzy across all industries, with companies setting out to quickly add data scientists to their payroll. This ‘frenzy’ of course tapered off and the data scientist trend seemed to lose its luster over the last few months, with some believing that there isn’t a need for human data analysis.

What we witnessed last week, however, was that there has never been a greater need for data scientists than right now. Hearing presentations from companies such as Datablend and ThinkData, reminded us that companies need the ability to apply number crunching skills, with technology, to solve business problems and derive meaningful insights from their data.

Beyond data scientism, it is also clear that data projects and systems are coming of age. With the technology maturing and use cases becoming more prevalent, the conversations during breaks evolved from “what are you doing with big data?” to how people were using technology to respond to real business needs.

Last, but not least, here are a few pictures from the event.

BigData.be meetupBigData.be meetup
BigData.be meetup
BigData.be meetup
BigData.be meetup

Thank you again to the sponsors, members, and presenters that made the 20th anniversary of the Belgian Big Data Meet Up the best (and largest one) yet. See you next year!