Image: IBM

Dave Vellante had the opportunity to speak with Inhi Cho Suh, VP of Product Management, IM SW at IBM, at IBM Flash 2013 to talk about big data analytics supporting Flash (full video below).  Suh says that IBM’s investing more than $1 billion for research and development, acquisitions and storage, with the hope of allowing customers to take better advantage of what Flash is capable of doing.

Asking about the big data space, Vellante wants to know what’s going on with the DB2 and Hadoop coming together and real time and memory all coming together.  Suh says that there has been a confluence of things coming together with clients wanting to access things via the cloud, power shifting to the consumers, mobile apps, all driving changes to the systems.  From the vantage points of data, clients want to be able to make sense of their data faster, and now they’re able to do that in a way that is much more affordable than ever before.

There’s now a debate going on about Hadoop which is designed to be batched and the rest of the world will connect to it, but the rest of the world is really trying to make Hadoop in real time.  Suh says that real time is all-relevant, and “IBM is really the only vendor that has streaming technology the ability to consume all sources and all types of data in true real time, an when you thin about Hadoop,” while stream computing is a different design of being able to sense and respond.  They’re not pushing Hadoop beyond to allow data to be streamed and assessed to help further the customer’s goals.

IBM has a wide portfolio that has given them all of the pieces that they need in order to further the analytics of the company.  Suh says they’re never satisfied though, and they’re naturally curious to know about how their customers are leveraging this technology.  They’re also making it a point to learn as they go, and they’re hoping to stay in front of the pack by continuing to innovate.

Vellante says that everyone’s coming out with their own Hadoop distributor and asks Suh if there’s going to be a Red Hat of Hadoop.  Suh points out that one of the constraints is the lack of skills and the lack of understanding of the type of capabilities that are involved with Hadoop.  Clients are saying they’ve got a lot of data, a lot of skills and they want to get as much value out of their current systems as possible.  In the world of Hadoop you need people and services in order to make sense of a lot of the information with services and the role of services being seen almost as a secret weapon.

Vellante says that at some point you’re going to get commoditized, and IBM is doing everything they can, and making great progress, to stay ahead of the pack when it comes to the ever (and always) changing field of technology.