Big Data & Digital Marketing

1. IBM is improving its cloud-based elastic data warehouse;

2. Cloudera announces Ibis: a project for letting data-scientists use Python directly on Hadoop;

3. Amazon is making Elastic MapReduce almost plug-and-play.

What's especially interesting about all of these announcements is that they are signs of a maturing market. No one's introducing a brand new data processing engine. Instead, IBM is improving, acquiring and competing; Amazon is streamlining; Cloudera is re-platforming; and Apache NiFi is integrating.

I cannot think of any other place for Big Data but the cloud!

Amazon and Microsoft are clear leaders at the moment, but there is a lot of movements and Oracle might well catch up.

My Hadoop clusters have always been running on the cloud and will always be (I am currently using HDInsight on Azure).

"Good intentions don't work, but a repeatable, measurable and improvable process can" by Anurag Gupta, at Amazon.

Nobody wants to hire the wrong person and nobody wants to work for the wrong company. By following processes, it is possible to reduce the probabilities for things like these to happen.

1. Raise the bar, steadily and honestly;

2. Build a hiring funnel. By consistently repeating a process, you improve it. Do yourself a favour: filter candidates at each step;

3. Don't go easy on culture. This is the hardest to standardize, and yet it's one of the main reason why employee will not stay.

Increase profit or improve customer experience?

Big Data is a great tool. If used wisely it can deliver great value and long-lasting success.