Big data roads lead to Santa Clara

There were a lot of really good conferences on Big Data last year, but the one that stood out for me was the combined Strata Conference + Hadoop World, held in London in November. So this week's two-day conference in California, with some cracking case studies, is starting the year off very nicely. Particularly looking forward to presentations by Mark Madsen, Sarah Sproehnie and Yael Garten. Will report my thoughts.

Data mining goes mainstream - mark your diaries

26 March, London, the UK Symposium on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2013, organised by BCS SGAI, the Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence. Very flattered and almost intimidated to be invited to add an analyst's view to the speakers.
Here's the abstract;
"The emergence of in memory databases, notably for businesses the announcement in January 2013 that HANA now underpins the SAP Business Suite (and by the time of UKKDD 2013 expect Oracle to have offered something similar), illustrates that data mining capabilities are moving from the ‘interesting, and nice to have’ categories, to potential business differentiators. In this presentation Mike will look at the potential adoption and benefits of in memory databases, and describe why he believes that Data Scientist is going to be the next big role within business information management."
Expect some challenging debate.

NI plays £20m 'Spot the Ball'

News International (NI) which publishes The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun in the UK has purchased the clip rights for English Premier League matches starting with the 2013/14 season. This is a deal reported to be valued at £20 million. Clip rights allow the publication of 'near real-time' (actually a couple of minutes delayed) snippits of action, such as goals, that are ideal to be consumed on mobile phones and tablets.
So why am I, as technologist, who was always the last to be picked for the football team at school, interested in this? Because it is all about the technology raising the money to rescue the loss-making broadsheet papers, and ensuring an additional income stream for the 'red top', before as seems inevitable, parent company News Corporation sells its newspaper publishing business.
As demonstrated at the Olympics last year and by NI's sister company BSkyB's Sky Go offering, streaming technology is now very robust, and as 4G spreads across UK population centres (where Premier League football stadia are) next year performance should be good.
However, monetising clips is incredibly difficult because the consumer market has come to expect the majority of content to be on the internet for free. Furthermore the combination of HD cameras on mobile devices, wifi and YouTube means that user generated clips are always quickly and readily available.
Notwithstanding that I believe these clips could be the 'killer content' on the three newspapers' apps for tablets and smart phones. The Times and Sunday Times already have their written and expanding video content behind a £4/week paywall, admittedly with only 131,000 subscribers in October 2012. However, The Sun does not currently have a paywall, and it must also be assumed that a significant proportion of the red top's football loving readership will already have access to Premier League action via SkySport television.
BUT, and it is not so much of a big but, Premier League season tickets now range from £500 - £2000 a year. With single match day tickets being not less than £30, a significant proportion of the target market for match attendees is becoming  ABC1. Those who have more than average incomes, those most likely to have iPad and also those most likely to read The Times and Sunday Times. Could be a nice alignment and inducement to pay for the broadsheet app?
NI has said (at the moment) it has no plans to syndicate the clip rights so it is going to have to get its returns from the apps for its own titles. With The Times and Sunday Times currently losing £40m a year, this means The Sun app must be going behind a paywall this year. Will The Sun readers go for it? Well many pay £60-90 a month for their SkySport subscription, something many of us would never have thought sustainable a couple of years ago, and they are probably also paying approximately £20 month on their mobile contracts.
I remember watching football matches of the 1970's and 1980's when supporters in the stand would be listening via an earpiece on their transistor radios to the commentary on a rival's match whilst watching their favourite team. Their equivalents now have tablets and smart phones.
So how about £4/week to access and share HD clips with your mates at the stadium, in your living room, in the pub, or wherever else you are watching a match?
I think NI has spotted the ball, and also expect to see many more tablets in the hands of Premier League supporters while they are supposedly watching a match they have paid for.

"My precious" - why IT/IM should not be like Gollum

(c) MGM 212

With the impending realse of the film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit in the UK, I was reminded of the character Gollum's attitude to the One Ring. He described it as "my precious" despite the fact it had distorted his mind and was gardually killing him. Whilst such an attitude to something you possess and control is a bit extreme, many CIOs, CTOs and even CFOs, take the same view of their information management/IT provision. 

I am the first to champion the call that information is an organisation's most important asset, but that does not mean I agree that the organisation is always the best to manage and explot that asset.

I keep my money in a bank, I pay my local mechanic to service my car, so why, if I were still a CIO/CTO, would I have issues about asking better resouced, focussed and trained professionals to provide my information management/IT capability?

There are 9 questions/myths about managed services/outsourcing and cloud provision that I regularly have to address - and burst.

Gollum didn't have a happy end in Lord of the Rings. Neither will CIOs/CTOs who do not prioritise delivery over (percieved) control.

FAST enterprise search is back - and doing it in Norway

Further to the Microsoft SharePoint 2012 Conference held in Vegas in mid November, Norwegian search solutions company Comperio has been running a series of events around Europe. In London Bjorn Olstad, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and a key acquisition when Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, confirmed that Microsoft is lifting search out of SharePoint and that enterprise search development will be headquartered in Norway, where the company is intending to recruit 50 people.
This is highly strategic good news, and for me confirms the line that Bjorn (and I from an independent perspective) have been saying for at least the last six years, "search is the new portal".

Caveat emptor

 

Those analysts (including myself) who have covered the enterprise search and information management arena for the last decade, had a general consensus that when Autonomy's market capital reached $5 billion, the CEO Mike Lynch and co. would sell up to one of the software behemoths, and Oracle was top of most analyst's lists.
Well it went to $6 billion with some really smart and complimentary acquisitions (Interwoven, Meridio, ZANTAZ etc),  and I even went on record as saying that potentially Autonomy could be the UK's next CA or Oracle.
Then HP paid (literally) 'top dollar' at $10 billion for the company in 2011, but didn't really appear to have a game plan for the integration of the technology into HP's developing information management stack. It was noticeable that HP didn't want to keep Mike because they didn't appoint him to the board. It was also noticeable that Autonomy became a very independent unit within HP, even to the point of re-hiring people it lost when it was first acquired.
Now HP says it has to take an $8.8 billion charge on the acquisition after "serious accounting improprieties".

This is more than a little ironic as a great deal of Autonomy's expansion in the US came after a street (collective noun) of banks bought Autonomy's IDOL and other software to help them identify their own accounting 'holes' after the Lehman Brothers collapse and the sub-prime debacle.

Were there "accounting improprieties"? I am not qualified to say. But if I was going to spend $10 billion on a company with a market cap of $6-7 billion, I would want to do a heap of due diligence first. Whilst some things will always be missed in the M&A process, overestimating by 88% a company's value (which is what HP now believes) is a huge error on any accountant's spreadsheet.
So what next? Lots of fees for lawyers and (hopefully better) accountants, and there is a good chance that much of the really good software that Autonomy brought to HP will be lost in the melee.
My final thought is of a sign I saw in a tableware shop in Palo Alto "You broke it - you bought it".

Cloud-in-a-box? Why wouldn’t you?

Interesting briefing this morning with the UK arm of technology solutions provider Avnet and HP. It was around a product labelled ‘Cloud-in-a-box’, whose purpose is to give organisations the capability to cost effectively develop and test applications in a controlled environment.

Given current economic constraints, we have demands for faster development and roll-out of enterprise applications which are ‘right first time’. This combined with the increasingly pervasive nature of internet accessibility, and the devices that can be used, means that cloud deployment is becoming the implementation route of choice for organisations of all sizes and complexions.

But rapid/agile development always comes with a level of risk, not least in that test environments are often ‘second-hand’ servers, ‘under the desk’ with limited controls, measurement or management. This situation frequently arises because putting together a business case for a controlled IT test environment can be quite nebulous.

 

The CIAB proposition is for Avnet, through it's partner network, to deliver a preconfigured HP BladeSystem Matrix, with appropriate RAM, discs, a network switch, and HP’s Quality Center test management tools for measurement and quality assurance. All provided on a subscription model, avoiding the capex issue.

As a former IT director, who ‘knew’ that many of his developers, and even network managers, were trying to, (and had to), develop production ready applications on ‘under the desk’ equipment, the concept of the Avnet and HP CIAB is a no-brainer.

 

I will be writing in more detail about the appliance in the next week, however I would recommend those current and potential Avnet partners, whose interest I have raised, to attend Avnet’s webinar on 28 November bit.ly/RNbUsm