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Thought Leadership

Strata + Hadoop World: A Rallying Cry for the Business Case

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of attending the Strata + Hadoop World conference in New York City – an event I look forward to every year. I’ve always found this conference to be a meeting place for some of the sharpest, most innovative minds in the technology industry. O’Reilly Media has a sharp nose for the Next Big Thing, attracting inspiring speakers for timely topics and a great audience to its shows.

The Hadoop framework and its ecosystem partner projects like Kafka and Spark play a huge role in NGDATA’s technology platform evolution. It opens up a whole new world of data-driven applications, and we have been using it to help our customers to create actionable, predictive insights and to act on and influence customer behavior. Hadoop changed the way organizations interact with and respond to data in a good way. But as I walked the Strata + Hadoop World floor, I noticed something.

Perhaps it’s because the show was filled with technical experts and investigative data scientists – we certainly do love to discuss theory and experimentation – but the one thing I found lacking at the show was a preponderance of ‘brick and mortar’ business use cases. There is so much talk today about how data can be stored, accessed and acted on using Hadoop, but we’re rapidly approaching the time where conference rubber must meet the real-life business road. Discussions around potential and proofs of concept have serious value, but I worry that the culture of Hadoop is becoming a bit too focused on what can be done that we’re losing sight of what already is being done.

Of course, understanding what is being created by innovation trailblazers and platform visionaries can be inspiring, but let’s face it, there’s only one Amazon, one Netflix, one AirBnB, one Facebook, one Google out there and one can sometimes question the value of their war stories for ‘mere’ incumbents. Sure these stories offer great appeal to architects and technologists, but our definition of success is not technology and tool adoption, instead addressing actual business challenges in a fully operationalized and quantifiable way.

Companies are transforming the way they do business because of Hadoop, now. We see it every day with our customers at NGDATA. Banks, telcos, and media companies are fostering customer loyalty, reducing attrition, and improving the customer experience because they’ve taken Hadoop out of the IT and innovation underbelly and are making it part of the conversation at the business level, focusing on these areas where stakeholders can really see its continuous value.

Hadoop will only continue to grow if organizations’ investment in it creates value. And it will only create value if it’s deployed with specific, actionable use cases that affect the business in mind. Rather than build a data lake, experiment with the myriad of available big and data science frameworks, and assume the use cases will follow, our industry needs to take a more business-driven approach by creating clear initiatives based on specific business parameters that will benefit their business.

I’m confident that this is being done across the world, but those of us tasked with evangelizing technology within our organizations have to get better at putting our business hats on and be less obsessed with tools. Playtime is over – let’s get to work!