Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. opened its HP Big Data Conference 2015 on August 11 in Boston with a signature keynote event. Jeff Veis, vice president of solution marketing for HP Autonomy, kicked off by revealing the tagline of the event, “Seize the Data.” Veis summed up the company’s bold mission to tap, harness and do things with data that drive innovation.

The first-day keynote speakers included Robert Youngjohns, executive vice president of HP Software; Colin Mahony, senior vice president and general manager of HP Software Big Data; Turing Award winner Mike Stonebraker; and Poppy Crum, senior principal scientist from Dolby Laboratories, Inc.

The Mission

Robert Youngjohns, of HP Software, kicked off the discussion by outlining the mission for the company moving forward. According to Youngjohns, “The amount of information (data) has exploded as a periphery to everything we do and has taken over our ability to analyze it.” He went on to say, “The tools are just now catching up.”

The challenge for enterprise is to make sense of this information and derive value from it. Youngjohns then laid out the core of HP’s strategy – create a practical application for everyday problems and focus on the pragmatic and real.

There were four underlying strategies in both the HP executive’s presentations that included building a platform that integrates all technology, providing real-time security to reduce network breaches, supporting the data and enabling users to work across platforms.

The Support

Following Youngjohns, HP Software’s Colin Mahony reviewed industry trends and echoed much of the mission Youngjohns defined.

“Organizations that make an impact are the ones that pull together everyone from beginning to end,” remarked Mahony. His message was of support that included building the platform to support all data types, support for open source and support for developers in order to get a single view of the user experience to enrich predictive life cycle management.

The Visionary

Turing Award winner Mike Stonebraker joined Mahony on stage for a Q&A session in which Stonebraker showed exactly why he won the “Noble Prize” for computer science.

“Business success will come to the nimble – so get agile,” said Stonebreaker. He reviewed the three problems he sees with data today, volume, velocity and variety, and spoke to the ways the industry is addressing these problems.

Stonebraker also provided insight into where careers are heading in the field of computer science. “Business analysts are going to give way to data scientists … in the future; Big Data will require much more sophisticated analysis.” He went on to say that many colleges are trying to prepare for this inevitability.

His parting advice for all: “Get smart on data science.”

The Science

Poppy Crum from Dolby Laboratories was the final speaker, and she examined the way our brains react to our environment. She stated, “My belief is that the intersection of science and technology is where great things are going to happen.”

This interesting lecture featured humans as computational organisms reacting to data in the environment and explained how one’s experience of the world gets them to a robust and actionable state.

Crum’s presentation identified the importance of leveraging this actionable state in differing environments and the significance of understanding the output of your brain can optimize how the brain uses data.

Stay tuned for complete live coverage of the HP Big Data Conference 2015. Watch the full keynote event below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HP Big Data Conference 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE