In light of the Global HR Forum 2014, which will take place in Seoul from November 4 to 6, 2014, The Korea Economic Daily had e-mail interviews with several distinguished speakers on various subjects. Below, we highlight one of our forum speakers, Eli Collins CTO of Cloudera, a global big data company...Ed.
Reporter: Park Byungjong
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Cloudera is an enterprise software company, founded in 2008 by leaders in big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo!.Cloudera's mission is to help organizations leverage the power of all their data. We provide a platform for big data, based on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, process and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data As the leading educator of Hadoop professionals, Cloudera has trained over 22,000 individuals worldwide. Over 1,000 partners and our professional services team help deliver greater time to value. Leading organizations in every industry plus top public sector organizations globally run Cloudera in production.
2. In March, Cloudera Received huge investment from global tech companies such as Intel, Google. What do you think was the reason why these companies had decided to invest on your company?
Big Data is one of the most important trends in technology today, and Apache Hadoop is the primary
technology enabling and underlying the trend both in web-scale companies and more recently enterprise data centers and cloud deployments. Intel predicts Hadoop is going to be the number one application running on Intel servers. Intel’s strategy is to enable open, Intel optimized big data solutions that accelerate the ability of enterprises to deploy big data solutions, and to drive growth of the data center total addressable market. Cloudera’s mission is to enable organizations around the world to profit from all of their data, and is the market leader in the big data. By combining development, marketing and sales efforts we believe we can take both company's visions farther, faster than we could alone.
3. What is the Strength of big data analysis application based on Hadoop?
With Apache Hadoop you can store all data, for as long as desired or required, in its original fidelity; integrated with existing infrastructure and tools; with the flexibility to run a variety of workloads — batch processing, interactive SQL, search, and advanced analytics.
4. Cloudrea provides big data service for public cloud cooperating with Amazon. Could you please explain the relations among big data, cloud and internet of things? Why is big data so important?
As you mentioned, Cloudera supports our platform on the public cloud, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Data generated from new devices (the "internet of things”) often lands in the public cloud, and requires processing and analysis. As data moves to the public cloud public cloud infrastructure has become an increasingly popular platform on which to to run big data infrastructure and applications. In short, big data infrastructure goes where the data lives.
5. Cloudera bought Gazzang the security software company last year June. Do you need this kind of security technology for big data analysis? Why does it matter?
Data security is a top priority for businesses using Hadoop so Gazzang, the big data security experts, was a natural fit. The addition will immediately deliver enterprise-grade data encryption and key management, addressing head on the challenges associated with securing and processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem. Thus fulfilling a requirement in myriad compliance regulations like HIPAA-HITECH, PCI-DSS, FERPA and the EU Data Protection Directive.
6. How can firms make profit using big data analysis? Would you show me some example of big data business at least 3 cases?
Some companies products and business models are entirely built around big data. Google was an early example of this.
Many companies use data to make better, faster decisions, and big data enhances their capabilities. Here are three examples from the financial services sector:
- Payments processors are analyzing decades of credit card transactions (joined with other data sets), to improve their ability to detect fraudulent transactions
- Investors are able to run more sophisticated risk analysis jobs to compute value at risk (VAR) in real time so they can manage their assets more effectively
- Algorithmic traders continuously analyze massive amounts of market data to identify trading opportunities
There are similar examples in Government, Retail, Manufacturing, Media, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Energy, etc.
7. I think big data analysis could violate privacy and raise issues related to it. What do you think about this issue?
Any technology that collects and provides access to data has the potential to be used in ways that violates privacy. Data privacy is a requirement or users of big data, and is the reason, per above, that security technology is such an important part of Hadoop.
8. I think creative and talented person is necessary for big data industry. How could we help the young to cultivate their creativity in this era? What do you think is the most important element for education?
Curiosity and the desire to learn. Also, many of the people doing well in the big data industry are able to combine a multitude of skills. For example, data scientists are skilled in math, programming and the problem domain they’re working in. They may not be the best mathematician, programmer or business expert, but the combination of these skills still lets them achieve things that experts in each individual field have not been able to.
9. With rapid technological developments and urbanization, fragmentation of society has increased and people have become individualized. It generates some kind of social cost. To reduce this social cost, we need to promote social trust and integration. How can we make it?
I think there’s more social trust than we realize, and I think technology can actually help us discover it. It’s painfully Silicon Valley of me to use Airbnb and Uber as examples, but, pessimists said people would never share their houses or cars with strangers, but that’s exactly what's happened. I think the more we are exposed to each other, and the more we understand each other, the more likely we are to trust each other. Urbanization and technology are facilitating each of these, so, while they may be part of the problem, they’re also part of the solution.
10. At Global HR Forum 2014 in November, what are you planning on focusing when delivering your speech? Could you give us an idea what your topic is and general outline of your speech?
I plan to speak about the lessons businesses outside the technology industry can learn from the world of open source software and open data. Specifically, how the forces that have transformed my industry apply to other businesses as well. Open source and open data are fundamentally about changing the relationships in how software and data are produced and consumed. I believe there are parallels in other industries, and therefore some of the lessons we’ve learned are applicable there as well.
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