I talk to many pioneers in big data going back many years and the early drivers of great technical trends come from those #techathletes – like Amr Awadallah founder Cloudera, Arun Murthy at Yahoo (now Hortonworks), and many more.  The common thread in all big tech trends is that they almost always comes from those technical visionaries and first movers in cutting edge companies/startups, open source communities, and academic researchers.

What is the next big thing in #bigdata?  It’s called Spark.

Spark is a fast data analysis engine. Think Hadoop MapReduce, but 100x faster and still fully interoperable with the wider Hadoop ecosystem. Spark has the largest open-source development community in the Big Data space, after Hadoop MapReduce, with over 90 developers from 25 companies contributing code.

And now, the folks behind Spark are organizing the First Apache Spark Summit, December 2-3, in San Francisco. In fact they’ve just published the agenda with talks from 18 companies and universities, including Yahoo! (the birthplace of Hadoop itself), Intel, Adobe, Cloudera, UC Berkeley, and more. With it’s focus on speed, both in performance and in the development lifecycle, Spark has already become a crucial component of the Big Data stack at these companies and many others. The startup Databricks is the main organizer of the event, in partnership with Sessions Events. Databricks recently launched with $14 million in venture capital funding, is committed to the open source success of Spark, and just last week announced a partnership with Cloudera to promote support for Spark’s many production users.

In addition to the community sourced talks, the Spark Summit will feature Keynote talks by Matei Zaharia (CTO Databricks, Faculty at MIT, and the creator and leader of the Spark project), as well as Ion Stoica (CEO, Databricks), Mike Franklin (Director of the UC Berkeley AMPLab, the home of the BDAS, the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack), and two senior engineers from Yahoo.

I recommend anyone doing #bigdata in either a startup or big company to check this event out.  Great people and great mission.  This will (imho) be big as data and real time take center stage for big data platforms for the future.

Register with discount code “SiliconANGLE” for 10 percent off to attend and connect with one of the most exciting and rapidly growing communities in Big Data.