IBM Watsonizes Big Data, We Think
March 17, 2011
A headline passed our radar “IBM Launches Big Data “Boot Camps” from eWeek.com. We were a big surprised because IBM has been in the big data game for years. Plus IBM owns Cognos, SPSS, and big daddy database DB2 that slices and dices.
But information technology workers have been drafted and are being shipped off to boot camps to learn about Big Data issues. IBM, the commanding officer behind this deployment, is sending recruiters out to IBM partners, colleges, and clients to educate them about IBM business analytics and information management software.
Big data is a new term being thrown around in the IT world. It is described as:
The term Big Data typically refers to datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and visualizing. As the world becomes increasingly instrumented, with sensors collecting data from all manner of sources, the Big Data phenomenon will continue to grow.
The boot camps were by the same outfit that brought American TV couch potatoes IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy. Companies are searching for new technology like Watson and the number crunching tools offered by IBM. We think the boot camps help educate—maybe sell—decision makers about a trend that has been beaten to death since MapReduce was first revealed by the Google and then morphed into Hadoop years ago.
IBM’s foot soldiers will learn about big data management and certain big data number crunching skills, data management planning/governance (what is governance anyway?), and software designed specifically for big data. Maybe Hadoop? Technology from Digital Reasoning?
IBM said the main focus would be on colleges and future students, but they will still depend on their partners and clients to expand the boot camp initiative.
I mentioned Watson earlier and how IBM is using his invention as a way to push analytics. Since Watson is so smart, why not ask him the correct way to approach big data? (I hope this is not too “snarky” so we get an AOL type request to be friendly to a $100 billion in revenue outfit that can crush a goose like a tiny insect.) Integration of these different IBM “moving parts” is too big a job for the goslings in Harrod’s Creek.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2011
Freebie unlike IBM’s recycled open source software products
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