In this video from the Adaptive Computing booth at SC14, Rich Brueckner from insideAI News presents Data and Goliath — Why Startups Own the Future of Big Data.
Full Transcript:
It is kind of weird for me to hear that I am a special speaker. But being here – I want to thank Adaptive for having me in. I apologize for my voice but I’ve been smoking cuban cigars at night, that somebody gave me. And I really enjoy that.
So, here’s who I am. If you haven’t heard of insideHPC, it is a news portal for high performance computing. And I am the primary writer on this. I also have a site called, insideAI News. The primary writer there is a man named Daniel Gutierrez. He is a data scientist. So I’ve been in HPC my whole career, writing about this stuff. He lives that world, and I’d like you to come check him out. Because this isn’t about plugging me. This was about startups. And Jill King from Adaptive – bless her heart – asked me to come talk.
But, I have a hobby blog called inside-Startups. It doesn’t make any money. But what I do have is, probably 50 pitches a week come to me from start-ups. They hire PR people to write about us, please. We don’t have any money for advertising. But I’m happy to oblige them, especially if I think their company has wheels, okay? And, so I focus mostly on the compute side of it., though I do get pitches from people who have invented new kinds of shoelaces and stuff. That’s interesting, I guess.
But at insideStartups, in the context of big data, there’s an important thing that’s going on that I wanted to talk to you guys about. The frontier – think of big data as this vast– the Wild West. And there’s no transcontinental railroad yet. Right? That means it’s undiscovered country. And there is no eminent domain. So if you think about. It’s 1848 and the big companies that ruled the East Coast, that did whatever – cotton-gins and such, etcetera right? They have no stake there. And today’s world, that would be the people that run big data kind of things, like: Oracle, SAP, SAS. Think of them like the East Coast in 1848. Okay? They see the West as something that’s interesting. But, no-one owns anything the other side of the Mississippi. Okay?
And this is an important point. Because, I have interviewed over 200 big data companies in the last three and a half years. Not a single one is using legacy technology, like Oracle, SAS, SAP. Because you know what? Most of them are funded with VC money or they’re in the process of getting funded. VCs don’t want to spend money on licenses for things like Oracle. They’d rather use an open source – something that you can own. Right? Write it from scratch. Don’t– use Oracle, write your own IP and leverage NoSQL, R, or whatever it is, right?
And, to me, the point of this talk is that the world is changing. There is money going to be made by the bucketful, and it isn’t going to go to Larry Ellison and his gang. It’s going to go to smart people like you who know how to leverage open-source. Because guess what, Beowulf and all this stuff that makes makes all this ecosystem work. And, you know, Don Becker and Thomas Sterling who invented this stuff. They made Beowulf happen. They didn’t make a dime off that, guys. They don’t care. It was enabling Science and Engineering. This is exactly what is going to happen in the big data space. And, I wouldn’t sell my Oracle stock because they know how to siphon money out of people. Yeah, I need to tell [them?]. I worked for them for two and a half days after they bought Sun Microsystems.
Anyhow, not to pick on Oracle. They’re a fine organization but, they don’t own the future. They are going to fade into the sunset. And companies like them. Open-source companies, startups. People that leverage tools like R. And look at what Adaptive computing is doing, hooks into things like Docker. Docker’s going to change this space with virtualization. Right? Virtualization will enable service delivery of HPC like you’ve never seen.
And it’s coming. It’s in its infancy. Right? VMware, and companies like that are bringing products to market that are supportable. But look into Docker. You guys experiment with great stuff. Bail. I mean, I’m sitting here. I’m hearing your stories all week. But, Docker is something. Look into it. Play with it. It is going to change the world. And it spells one thing to me. And that is opportunity. It is opportunity for you. To take your bright minds and your bright friends. Start a company. Get something. Play with that software. And go make a bucket-ton of money. And, change the world at the same time.
So, as I wrap this up, you guys. Yeah, I’m a big fan of Docker. I’ve interviewed those guys. And, all I see is like bells and whistles in my head are going, bing, bing, bing. This is the shh – I won’t use the s-word. Okay. But it is going to change the world. Virtualization, commercially through VMware will change the world, as well. And it probably be mix of things. Like, you know, when Red Hat, and OpenStack and all this other goodness that Adaptive does, very well, thank you very much.
That is the future. Look forward. Don’t look back. Thank you very much. [applause]
Download the MP3 * Check out the insideHPC Guide to Virtualization, Cloud and HPC
