Sessions at Strata 2012 on Wednesday 29th February in Ballroom H

Organizations today are generating data at an ever-increasing velocity but how can they leverage this Big Data? In this session, Expedia, one of the world’s leading online travel companies, describes how they tapped into their massive machine data to deliver unprecedented insights across key IT and business areas – from ad metrics and risk analysis, to capacity planning, security, and availability analysis.By using Splunk to harness their data, Expedia saved tens of millions of dollars andfreed up key resources who now can focus on innovation instead of just operations.

Do you plan to extract insights from mountains of data, including unstructured data that is growing faster than ever? Attend this session to learn about Microsoft’s Big Data solution that unlocks insights on all your data, including structured and unstructured data of any size. Accelerate your analytics with a Hadoop service that offers deep integration with Microsoft BI and the ability to enrich your models with publicly available data from outside your firewall. Come and see how Microsoft is broadening access to Hadoop through dramatically simplified deployment, management and programming, including full support for JavaScript.

This session is sponsored by Microsoft

These days users won’t tolerate slow applications. More often than not, the database is the bottleneck in the application. To solve this many people add a caching tier like memcache on top of their database. This has been extremely successful but also creates some difficult challenges for developers such as mapping SQL data to key-value pairs, consistency problems and transactional integrity. When you reach a certain size you may also need to shard your database, leading to even more complexity.

VMware vFabric SQLFire gives you the speed and scale you need in a substantially simpler way. SQLFire is a memory-optimized and horizontally-scalable distributed SQL database. Because SQLFire is memory oriented you get the speed and low latency that users demand, while using a real SQL interface. SQLFire is horizontally scalable, so if you need more capacity you just add more nodes and data is automatically rebalanced. Instead of sharding, SQLFire automatically partitions data across nodes in the distributed database. SQLFire even supports replication across datacenters, so users anywhere on the globe can enjoy the same fast experience.

Stop by to learn more how SQLFire gives high performance without all the complexity.

This session is sponsored by VMware

MapReduce, Hadoop, and other “NoSQL” big data approaches open opportunities for data scientists in every industry to develop new data-driven applications for digital marketing optimization and social network analysis through the power of iterative, big data analysis. But what about the business user or analyst? How can they unlock insights through standard business intelligence (BI) tools or SQL access? The challenge with emerging big data technologies is finding staff with the specialized skill sets of the data scientist to implement and use these solutions. Business leaders and enterprise architects struggle to understand, implement, and integrate these big data technologies with their existing business processes and IT investments and provide value to the business. This session will explore a new class of analytic platforms and technologies such as SQL-MapReduce® which bring the science of data to the art of business. By fusing standard business intelligence and analytics with next-generation data processing techniques such as MapReduce, big data analysis is no longer just in the hands of the few data science or MapReduce specialists in an organization! You’ll learn how business users can easily access, explore, and iterate their analysis of big data to unlock deeper sights. See example applications with digital marketing optimization, fraud detection and prevention, social network and relationship analysis, and more.

This session is sponsored by Teradata Aster

Data Scientists deal with a complex world of Big Data – increasing volume, velocity and variety of data – demanding an evolution in the solutions for analytics. Analytics today are not just about statics but really understanding the meaning of content regardless of the source or the structure. This is even more the case with unstructured data. While unstructured data has been a major issue in the area of Intelligence and National Security, its now a mainstream problem with the overwhelming amount of information that users and business most face every day from Social Media and Online content. We can’t just search or count anymore- it is vital to create and make sense of the valuable interconnections of entities and relationships that are key to our daily decisions. Tim will introduce Automated Understanding for Big Data and explain how this new evolution is the fundamental step in the next wave of software. Tim will show the power of this new capability on a large and valuable dataset that has never been deeply understood by software before.

This session is sponsored by Digital Reasoning