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Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft did the welcome and introduced the opening keynote speaker Ronny Kohavi of Microsoft formerly of Amazon. Kohavi presentation “Online Controlled Experiments: Listening to the Customers, not to the HiPPO.†The Highest Paid Person in an Organization is a HiPPO and while they may sign the paychecks, it is the customer that sends him the money. If you don’t properly analyze the data you will miss important cues that drive more sales. Ask what you are optimizing for.
David Steier of PricewaterhouseCoopers moderated panelists DJ Patil of LinkedIn, Ken Rudin of Zynga, Neel Sundaresen of Ebay and Kevin Weil of Twitter. They discussed Competing on Analytics at the Highest Level.†The demand for professionals with solid database development is increasing. Look for people with experience in Oracle data warehousing, SQL, Cloudera, Vertica, Tableau, Hadoop, Pig and Memcache D. Start budgeting and being very nice to the database people you hire.
Sanjay Poonen of SAP gave the second keynote presentation “Leading the Analytics Revolution.†You can now do analytics from mobile devices like the iPhone using SAP apps.
Owen Thomas of VentureBeat moderated panelists Amr Awadalla of Cloudera, Joshua Klahr of Yahoo, James Phillips of Northscale and Joydeep Sen Sarma of Facebook. They discussed “Analyzing Big Data.†Cloud computing frees you from poorly structured datasets tied to old hardware. Learn Hadoop and MapReduce to process big data, awesome data and stupendous amounts of data.
Before and during lunch there were short pitches from exhibitors and startups like Karmasphere, Accept Software, Agilis Solutions, Aster Data, CTPartners, Dyyno, Execustaff, IBM, KXEN, Medallia and MergerTech.
Peter Norvig of Google gave the third keynote presentation “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.†Believe it or not, more data means better results. The closer two points are to each other, the more likely they might share the same characteristics. The original picture of Mona Lisa will be at the center of a cluster.
Brett Sheppard of BigDataNews.com moderated panelists Jie Cheng ofAcxiom, Vispi Daver of Sierra Ventures, Peter Farago of Flurry, Tom McLaughlin of Accept Software and Jeff Minich of CalmSea. They discussed “New Frontiers for Analytics.†The breakthroughs in analytics are speeding up business cycles.
Jeff Kreulen of IBM gave the fourth keynote presentation “Analytics: An Applied Researcher’s Perspective”
Harold Yu, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP moderated panelists Stacey Curry Bishop of Scale Ventures, Asheem Chandna of Greylock, Kevin Efrusy of Accel, Sumeet Jain of CMEA and Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad. They discussed “The Investor Perspective.†They don’t want invest in anything that will quickly become a generic commodity. Companies want more than a small incremental lift. They want analytics to give them a dramatic change in the way they do business.
Jaap Suermondt of HP Labs gave the fourth keynote presentation “Research in Analytics for Operational Impact at HP.†A commitment to R&D at HP is producing clear improvements to everyday operations.




































Video of the conference can be seen at:
www.dyyno.com/sdforum
Copyright 2010 DJ Cline All rights reserved.