The company offers a cloud-based platform that analyzes the unstructured data streams a developer is tapping into, such as social media interactions and geotagged activity. It then allows the user to translate the real-time results that the system produces into new capabilities:  everything from shopping recommendations to more behind-the-scenes functionality such as reporting.

At the same time, the time investment that this would normally require is dramatically reduced thanks to a drag and drop panel that covers most aspects.

The really interesting part, however, is the integration. Precog offloads the streams associated with the entity data in a customer’s database to its own servers for analysis, and as a result can support almost every use case and an equally long list of programming languages. A developer can use the service’s REST API to integrate with data sources such as Twitter, while incorporating the service into a mobile app, we application or a backend system.

“For an investor who spent 20 years building data-centric infrastructure businesses, seeing something shiny in big data’s murky waters was an epiphany,” said Kirill Sheynkman senior director of RTP Ventures. He is joining Precog’s board of directors alongside SendGrid CEO, Jim Franklin.

The offering is currently in beta, and evidently already managed to impress a few VCs in addition to an initial customer base. Precog calls itself the world’s  first data intelligence-as-a-service, and is based on a subscription model that allows users to choose from different performance and capacity options. The same functionality is available with all plans, which range from 100 free megabytes to deployments in excess of one terabyte.

Precog’s Raises $2M for Drag ‘N Drop Analytics Interface is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Top Storage Industry Expert David Floyer Publishes Major Report on Industry Trends
• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• EMC CTO Discusses the Current State of Big Data
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• What Non-Nerdy Skills Do Data Scientists Need?
• What to Expect at Greenplum’s Data Science Summit: EMC World 2012

As you may guess from the fact that it was built on Force.com, Intel Cloud SSO and Salesforce are tightly integrated to the point where you can (entirely optionally) use a Salesforce identity as that single login across platforms. There’s also an (also optional) on-premises tool for integrating Active Directory identities into the Intel platform. Outside of the Salesforce.com ecosystem, Jain says that Intel Cloud SSO supports logins for over 200 SaaS applications and counting, mainly via open login standards like SAML and OpenID.

Obviously, Intel doesn’t have the only cloud SSO product out there. But Jain says that what really sets Intel’s apart is its McAfee technology backend, a context-aware layer that can “sense” what kind of device is using the portal, and the fact that it integrates with what Intel refers to as “seamless two-factor authentication,” where the processor itself generates the unique keycode with no user intervention, a feature available in Intel’s most recent enterprise processor product line.

But that’s all just a sidenote to Intel’s real master plan here. Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), the chip giant’s trusted computing play for cloud and virtual infrastructures, Intel pervasive encryption, McAfee Application Control for cloud/virtualized applications – Intel’s goal is simply to be all things cloud security to everyone, no matter which layer you’re working with.

From the processor through virtual machines through applications, Intel’s made it its mission to secure each slice of the cloud as best it can. It may seem strange, but it’s creating a complete security ecosystem that seems especially designed to assist service providers as they move up the stack from simple hosting to application delivery, where the real margins are.

Intel Cloud SSO And The Quest To Secure The Entire Cloud is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Salesforce.com Improves Its Facebook Integration. Where Are the Big Service Providers?
• Infographic: Public vs Private Cloud
• VCE Chairman Michael Capellas Cheers On Convergence in theCube at EMC World 2012
• Will Axcient Become a Super SaaS with it’s Apple Like Time Machine?
• Linux Foundation’s CloudOpen Conference Bridging Open Source Cloud/Big Data Communities
• Yammer Update Adds Enterprise Apps, Expands Social Network Ecosystem

“As you grow into a large company, you can get trapped into only selling what’s on the truck and positioning your company to sell what you have today,” he says. “To be a leader you have to see where the technology and markets are going and focus on where you will need to be to establish yourself as a leader.”

Part of that is messaging, but marketing without substance is hollow. “The Greenplum acquisition gave us that substance,” he says. And by allowing it to run as a separate operation, EMC avoids smothering it.

That strategy has paid dividends for EMC with a series of acquisitions including Data Domain and Isolon as well as Greenplum. “We tend to buy these smallish companies and use our cash to accelerate their growth while letting them run as separate units.”

The next big step for EMC in positioning itself as a big data leader, he said, is to establish clear business use cases for big data. “To b a leader you need to show those use cases and the technology and how to apply the technology to the use cases.”

Real time will be an important step for big data technology. It does little good if the personalized message to the customer arrives five minutes after that customer has left the store.

However, he said, “you always need friends. For instance Cisco is a friend, and VDI is the embodiment of that.” VDI also benefited from being a separate organization, he said. These ventures can be crushed in a large company as different groups step in and try to help. VDI struggled at the start, but now it has taken off and proven to be a stroke of genius, with a near-$1 billion run rate in the last 18 months.

As EMC moves into real-time big data, it can work with VMware, which has some nice technology such as Gemfire that can compliment Greenplum.

VCE also gives EMC an opportunity to open the door to making SAP another friend. “If we can go to SAP and say VCE will give them less complexity and lower total cost, that is a big deal, because that is what they struggle with,” he says.

And HANA and other SAP technology works well in the big data space, even through SAP itself does not yet seem aware of big data yet. In fact, SiliconAngle CEO and Cube Co-Host John Furrier said that when he asked SAP Co-CEO Jim Snabe about it, he said, “Big data is hype.”

Burton says that comes from the more conservative nature of SAP’s market. “SAP is very good at talking business value to business executives. While we are more of a scrappy technology company. Big data is a big technology concept, which is why I think we are there a little earlier.” But SAP will get there.

“We are very excited about where big data’s going, and converged infrastructure with Cisco and VMware will only get bigger and bigger,” he said. “And we’re not through with flash yet. But if you want to see what’s coming in the enterprise, look at what’s happening in consumer. Two-thirds of all objects in Amazon S3 come from Dropbox. That is what will drive us going forward.”

EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Commitment to Channel Expressed in Sales Strategy Changes
• VCE Chairman Michael Capellas Cheers On Convergence in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC to Integrate Avamar, Data Domain to Create End-to-End Solution
• VSPEX is Channel Partner Friendly, says EMC CMO Jeremy Burton

SAP has agreed to pay $45 per share, a 20 percent premium over ARBA’s closing price on May 21. The merger will have to go through the regular round of regulations before becoming official, and experts believe that the transaction will finalize sometime around the end of August.

Ariba offers hosted collaboration commerce solutions for the enterprise, and maintains a network of over 730,000 suppliers. It also has an equally impressive clientele, and all in all the acquisition will most likely prove to be a much-needed big boost to SAP’s cloud lineup.

“”We don’t have the DNA in the cloud,” SAP co-Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott said in an interview. “We’re probably the most strategic cloud player in the enterprise software industry.”

The BI giant is in fact on a race to build up a competitive cloud portfolio, and one of its biggest rivals is Oracle. Today the database kingpin made an acquisition of its own, buying social media marketer Virtue for a more modest yet still formidable sum of $300 million with a similar agenda of stepping up its act and better compete against the likes of SAP and Thismoment.  The latter sells a platform that brings together services similar to what Ariba and Virtue are offering under one pane of glass.

This is not the first time that Larry Ellison’s IT behemoth decided to counter its German competitor. Shortly after SAP bought SuccessFactors for over $3 billion,  a deal that went through only in February,  Oracle signed an agreement to pay $46 per share for Taleo, a firm that also provides cloud-based human resource management software.

Rumble in the Cloud: SAP Makes An Investment in Procurement with Ariba is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• SAP May Hold Answer to Oracle’s Fiscal Performance
• Oracle-SAP Trial Opens: How Grave was the Damage Done to Oracle?
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• VMware Co-President Mark Peek Resigns to Become CFO at Workday
• Your Guide to Choosing a Business Intelligence Tool
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The role of the data scientist is something we’ve been exploring for a while, and its definition is as elusive as the term “big data” itself.  The result is a pretty broad gray area where data scientists are carving out their own niches across a wide range of industries, the common denominator being their ability to break down company problems down to the data and build up a solution for business implementation.  That requires keen communication skills, as you have to work with the business leaders, and also understand the math behind the data.

“Sometimes [businesses] think they think they know what solution they want, but for us, we have to uncover their pain points to see how those problems manifest themselves, so we can bring it to the path part to understand it on our terms,” Sio explains.

It’s very much about balancing the left and right sides of the brain, which is a departure from the traditional career paths we’ve previously seen for mathematicians, statisticians and even engineers.  And that requires certain personality traits that are willing to think outside the box.

“[Data scientists] are very curious, persistent and tend to be very creative too,” says Lin.  “The problems we’re working on are new problems.”

New problems for new careers.  As a self-proclaimed problem junkie, Sio thrives on the excitement of new challenges as a data scientist.  “If you give me something, the gauntlet is thrown,” she smiles.  “If I know how to solve it immediately, it wouldn’t be fun.  These are things that haven’t been solved before.  It bothers you and nags you to get to that next step.  It’s so interesting and the payoff is great.

“It takes a special personality type that craves difficult, challenging things, and wants to learn something every time.”

Lin and Sio certainly make data science seem like an exciting trip, and that enthusiasm has led them each down a winding path traversing fraud detection in the finance industry and quality assurance in the broadcast media space.  Indeed, data scientists are finding that their varied skill sets make them adaptable in an era where big data has big demands.

Which begs the questions, how does one become a data scientist and is my current job at risk? Sio would say not to worry.  “You can’t start planning for what will happen until you know what’s happened.  Find what about [data science] is interesting to you…start thinking about expanding your skills in math if you’re interested in mathematics.  Choose something adjacent to your skill sets.”

Education will also play an important role in supporting the growing demand for data scientists, as Lin points out.  He’d love to see more programs at the university level as well, encouraging a stronger push in engineering, science and math.

What Non-Nerdy Skills Do Data Scientists Need? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• Peter Koliopoulos Barbara Spicek Talk VSPEX and Partner Relations
• EMC Takes a Predictive Approach to Customer Service
• EMC Draws Back the Curtain on Chorus Social Analytics Platform
• Greenplum Tackles the Cons of Hadoop, Forrester Approves
• How Predictive Analytics is Changing Healthcare

Vellante spoke with Capellas about why VCE is so important from a practitioner’s perspective. “I want to write one place, and I don’t really want to care about the physical layer beneath it,” Capellas said about infrastructure. “Between both Cisco and EMC, we knew there would be a convergence between where the network starts and compute ends.”

He continued, mentioning the expectations on new mainframes that could be created via bridging within the convergence between computation and communication.

IBM, he says, has a lot of understanding of the software stack for mainframes, and they added services in the cloud layer to that. In a way, IBM validates markets when it enters into them and “a high tide floats all ships.”

VCE wants to take the absolute best-in-class, such as Cisco with networking and fabric, and Intel blades for the compute and approach from both sides. It’s fitting this is being discussed at EMC World 2012 as EMC has seen a great deal of promise in VCE and sought to invest in VCE’s solution systems and coupled in VMware to virtualize the infrastructure.

Much of his discussion is about virtualization and whole-product solution and this maps back to previous interviews about companies who provide not just service but infrastructures. Between Cisco for network, Intel for computation (blades), and EMC for the rapid storage means that they have everything they need for a virtualizable infrastructure fabric.

We’ve seen a few use-cases of this enter the market and it feels a lot like hardware infrastructure to support a private cloud. Recently, the Tyler Independent School District, the largest in Northeast Texas, looked to VCE to help power their educational computer systems and provide a highly virtualized data center, giving students and faculty unfettered and rapid access to applications in their own secure private cloud.

Schools and other segments aren’t technology companies, they’re service sectors who work with people and they rely on their IT departments to do the heavy lifting and provisions. As a result, by choosing VCE the Tyler IDS of Texas allowed some of that weight to be taken off with the server support and left them to look to providing the proper software and applications for the educational environment onto that infrastructure.

Other sectors might also benefit from this sort of drop-in solution as well, believes Capellas and that’s what makes VCE the powerful startup it is right now.

[Edit May 23, 2012: Correction made to reflect Michael Capellas's proper title within VCE.]

VCE Chairman Michael Capellas Cheers On Convergence in theCube at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EMC and VCE Integrate Management Suite with VMware
• EMC’s Stuck on Tape, Speeds Mainframe Performance
• Texas Becomes Altar as EMC and Cisco Reunite in the Cloud
• Infographic: Public vs Private Cloud
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT

Big data has already caught on as a buzzword – now it’s all about the tools that empower organizations to be more efficient with their analytics strategy, and the solutions that make the data scientist’s job considerably easier.

The Talend Platform for Big Data is offered up as a sort of jack of all trades, addressing both these areas with visualization and a lot of automation. The open source set of tools is developer-centric thanks to elements such as drag and drop interfaces that increase productivity, while at the same time  it also improves on things such as monitoring, parsing and other administrative tasks.

More importantly, the Talend Platform works with Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Pig and Sqoop, as well as practically any other environment that contain massive quantities of structured, unstructured, semi-structured and machine-generated data in need of analysis.

“The Talend-EMC Greenplum certification creates powerful solutions for companies seeking to leverage big data to create business value,” said Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and chief operating officer, Talend. “Organizations that choose to take advantage of Talend and Greenplum will be able to quickly benefit from the combination of market leading data integration technology with high-performance and enterprise-ready Hadoop solutions, removing the complexity from big data management and producing faster time-to-value.”

Talend’s entire business is based on open source software and integration -  that model hasn’t disappointed so far. Vice president of marketing Yves de Montcheuil stopped by theCUBE at EMC World to discuss his take on data integration in the Era of Big Data.

Talend Announces Greenplum Integration @ EMC World is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• VMware Extends Desktop Virtualization Portfolio with Wanova
• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CTO Discusses the Current State of Big Data
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton

Chat has been a huge success, he said in an interview from the Cube at EMC World 2012 (see full video below). “More people contact us through chat than any other channel today. And we are solving problems 65% faster through chat than any other means of interaction.”

One reason for the success, he said, is that EMC has a specific rule that service agents can only do one chat session at a time, rather than the three or four that is common with many companies. That means that each customer gets individual attention and fast action.

Social media in the form of community forums was the next step, and it also “is getting a tremendous positive reception.” These forums provide an opportunity for customers to exchange thoughts, tips, solutions for problems, and just discuss their experience and situation in general with peers as well as EMC support personnel. They also provide a virtual meeting place where C-level EMC management as well as experts in specific areas can communicate with groups of customers. This gives customers a chance to learn about product road maps and company strategies and initiatives that in the past they only had at a few events a year at most.

The next challenge that EMC is meeting is to deliver those services in the native language of the customer, regardless of what that is. This applies to printed information as well as service delivered live over all channels – phone, chat, and social media.

This requires new skills. Linguistic skills, obviously, but also the ability to conduct good chat sessions or to arrange and conduct a meeting over social media. And the focus of service is gradually changing. The need for product-specific technical information is gradually shrinking, and information on how a product is used in a particular vertical is becoming more prominent. That means that EMC has to retrain its service personnel in these skills and new information.

The other major challenge for EMC is to harness big data technology to make its service more proactive. This includes data from the “Phone Home” system in which EMC hardware products in customer data centers report their status automatically to EMC, from service interactions via phone and chat, and from social media. is very powerful for predicting and preventing problems. This is proving to be very powerful.

“We are creating an early warning system using an algorithmic approach to predicting the likelihood of a particular problem at a particular customer site,” he said. “We hope to start sharing this information with customers before the end of the year.” This potentially could take the concept of customer service to a new level.

EMC Customer Services in Continuous Upgrade Mode is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• Head of Unified Storage Talks Consumption Models, Flash at EMC World 2012
• Cloud Meets Big Data Meets…Customer Service?
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton

“We’re seeing a real focus on big data as a business issue, not merely by wild-eyed visionaries in Silicon Valley, but by some of the biggest, business-focused vendors on the planet. And that’s because customers … recognize they have big data problems, and they need a big data solution.”

Despite the entry of these big players, the market is growing faster than the competition. CloudEra is seeing growth on every metric – total size of the clusters its existing customers are running, the pipeline of new business, the size of the investment that customers are making in the infrastructure are all sharply up. “Certainly our last year was tremendous, and we’re looking forward to an even bigger 2012.”

The big data market is moving forward rapidly in technology focus as well. For the first two years that CloudEra was in business, “we were trying to convince people that this platform was important.” Today Hadoop is the “anointed winner in the big data platform is space. So the question in big data now is what are you going to do with it? How are you going to get at it? What kinds of applications are going to make it available?”

That is where the commercial vendors are working, building those applications on top of Hadoop and hBase. “IBM’s Big Insights offering is very powerful, very interesting.”

Another product Olson cites as particularly interesting is the new version of Informatica PowerCenter/PowerExchange.  “It supports Hadoop natively, so you can integrate data from Hadoop with all your other infrastructure.”


Watch live video from SiliconANGLE2 on Justin.tv

Hadoop/hBase Big Data Market Booming, Says CloudEra CEO is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Business users are getting used to finding their own applications, either bought off-the-shelf, downloaded, or in the cloud as services, that they can set up in a minute or two and start addressing a business problem right away, often without talking to anyone from IT. Only later do they look to IT either to integrate the application with internal services, get help with a problem, or to take over managing the application.

“We’re trying to get ahead of that curve by transforming to become more of a systems management organization and less of a custom systems designer,” he said in the Cube in an interview webcast live on Siliconangle.TV from EMC World 2012. “I tell my people that in the future we will become less interested in the nuts and bolts of things and more in the services we wrap around them and the business needs those services address.”

At GSK, he said, IT has already redefined its internal resources as services that it markets internally to users in a fairly mature services catalog and a one-stop-shopping model. Now it is shifting toward an on-demand model using consumerized applications and will probably shift to good-enough services where they can be used to increase the speed with which it can meet user requests. The day when users would automatically get a negative answer to requests from IT are going away.

“Where we are breaking ground right now is with an internal private cloud and with new technologies like apps for the iPad. An app store is in development.”

GSK is committed to a hybrid cloud model, he said, partly because of the growing need for big data analysis. IT looks at cloud services as its first foray into that space, and he is at EMC World partly to learn more about big data. IT wants to provide back-end interfaces that allow end-users to access the data and apply whatever apps they find most useful for filling the business need.

Transformation, however, “is a multi-year journey,” and EMC is involved both as a hardware vendor and a service provider, he said. One initiative of the GSK transformation is centralization of its data centers. It recently built a new global data center to replace multiple aging centers, reducing the total number from 55 to about 25 so far, with a goal of getting down to five. So far that has involved moving more than 1,000 devices. They are still migrating applications to the new data center and, wherever possible, retiring applications. EMC collaborated on the migration strategy.

So is EMC more of a hardware or a services company? “Where a service is good enough,” he said, “EMC is a services company. Where we have proprietary services or data and absolutely care about the mission-critical aspect of those, EMC is a hardware company for us.”

IT Shifting from Nuts and Bolts to Services, Says GlaxoSmithKline [Video] is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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