February NYETM Summary by Michael Koh of OLC
Michael Koh of OfficeLeaseCenter wrote a thorough summary of the February NYETM. Check it out below.
On Tuesday, February 12, 2013, OLC attended New York Enterprise Technology Meetup's monthly event. There were five presenters this time around: Aerohive Networks, working to simplify (Simpli-Fi) enterprise access networks with a cloud-enabled, self-organizing service-aware, identity-based infrastructure that includes innovative Wi-Fi, VPN, branch routing and switching solutions; Datasift, a leading social data platform, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from billions of public conversation on social networks as well as from other social platforms. It provides access to real-time and historical social data to uncover insights; MapR Technologies, a managing platform for Hadoop systems making analyzing big data a reality for more business users; Datadog, a service for IT, operations and development teams who write and run apps at scale and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight; and Videolicious, a leader in providing ultrafast, automatic, super-easy video creation solutions.
MapR presented first, wit Tomer Shiran, Director of Product Management acting as speaker. "MapR is the Hadoop tech leader," Shiran said. "It uses Apache Hadoop as MapR distribution and MapR is an open, enterprise-grade distribution for Hadoop." Shiran continued that it is easy and dependable as well as fast. "MapR is open source with standards-based extensions and includes numerous Apache licensed open-source projects." MapR's objective is to make Hadoop open and safe to use. Languages like PIG, HIVE and Cascade are integrated, tested and hardened. "MapR is deployed at thousands of companies and allows customers to analyze massive amounts of data," Shiran said.
Shiran revealed that Amazon is an OEM partner of MapR and offers MapR editions at Amazon along with their own Hadoop editions. "This is the case at Google too," Shiran said. He introduced version m7 of MapR, the newest edition of the platform which now has native tables, fast region recovery—"It can do this in 10-20 seconds vs. 10-30 minutes," Shiran said—and snapshots, which allows the user to access a table directly on any type of file. Users can recover data that may have been deleted or corrupted and the user would be able to access the data as it was back in time.
Aerohive Networks presented next, and David Flynn, CEO of Aerohive spoke. "We're a Silicon Valley-based company," Flynn said. "And our focus is wireless." Flynn said that the mobile device explosion is "redefining the Enterprise network edge." Users now want to work anywhere on any device. "IT needs to enable them without drowning in complexity," he said. He compared the days gone by with contemporary times: "Yesterday was monolithic and WLAN orderly. Today, it's elastic and ubiquitous Wi-Fi."
What Aerohive works for is to simplify complex networks. "We're the next generation network infrastructure company," Flynn said. The network is cloud-enabled, controller-less Wi-Fi, routing and VPN. "You can easily deploy this anywhere," he said. Aerohive can be sold in vertical markets like healthcare, enterprise, logistics, education and retail. "We're a cloud-networking vendor that transforms networks into platforms for mobility," Flynn said. "We support business productivity and help you gain control." He gave an example of retail analytics and performing all transactions and monitoring bandwidth using a wireless retail infrastructure.
Aerohive allows for in-depth definitions of policies on its unified network dashboard system. "As part of overall network policy, you can configure firewalls and a lot more," Flynn said. "You can define hierarchies and utilize maps to show visualizations of radio profiles and have a rich set of functionalities to view the company. You can get a nice visualization of who is on the network and what applications are using up bandwidth." Aerohive's dashboard facilitates viewing application usage, the top 20 applications used by clients, and it can even narrow down to see what floor is using what apps, using up bandwidth and can view client usage as well.
"We're able to take this technology and use a branch router to use for disaster relief," Flynn said. "All you need to do is plug in a 4G card to an external wireless modem and you can easily access the internet or make phone calls." Flynn also revealed that the entire system integrates well with existing infrastructure.
Datadog was introduced by Alexis Lê-Quôc, co-founder and CTO. Datadog is a "new breed of monitoring as a service," Lê-Quôc said. He said that software engineers are the major customers of this product. "Monitoring needs were simple decades ago," he said, "because databases were relatively simple. Now, many things have changed. First off, there are more servers and they come and go. Second, legacy apps might still be Java-based, but new SQL databases use Rail, Python and so on, so Java is becoming replaced. And third, software releases used to be once a quarter, but now, it's about once a week because multiple agile teams are pushing for change constantly."
Datadog is the solution to the problems mentioned before. It solves the headaches brought on by too many servers, too many releases, too many tools. "The solution is to reboot monitoring," Lê-Quôc said. "Datadog aggregates data monitoring on one platform. It's one place where users can look at performance metrics and analyze it," he said. The interface is simple and sleek and uses a stream feed to inform the user of what was happening around the databases. "We used a stream format because it's very conducive to conversation," Lê-Quôc said. "It's very intuitive to use as well. The stream allows for thread discussions, so everything is in context."
Preconfigured dashboards allow users to see correlation between metrics. It can be viewed from hour intervals up to days, weeks and month to see if there is a pattern and can use the stream to extract what is relevant as well as explain why metrics are changing.
Robert Passarella, Managing Director at Datasift presented next. "A Tweet isn't just 140 characters of text anymore," Passarella said. "It's basically become a mine for analysts like us." Datasift aggregates unstructured data resources, enriches the data and then filters and delivers the data. "We sift through data on the internet," he said. To parse through data, the user must first create a filter or a stream and place key words for the platform to find within the billions of conversations floating around the internet. After this has been done, Datasift goes through social platforms that have been selected and provides data on a stream feed. The data includes gender, geolocation, content, language, Klout score, links, metadata, type of social platform, ReTweet count, Favorite count, and more.
"It can search for very specific texts," Passarella said. "It can look for links domains and view metadata tags. Users can also hone in and drill in what they want Datasift to find. There is an option to record the stream and download the data for future analysis. Datasift also can go back through history and use either 100 percent or 10 percent of sample size to send the data to multiple locations on a periodic basis."
Matt Singer presented Videolicious, which allows any user to create professional videos in just seconds. "Video has always been expensive and time consuming to produce. Now it's possible to create high-quality, professional videos in no time at all," Singer said. The first step to use Videolicious is to choose a shot, second step is to tap and talk, where the app automatically adds logos and external video footage and adds it into the video that the user has created. The third step is to add filters or background music—if the user chooses to do so. Videolicious boasts easy customization, making video as easy as creating text.
January 15th, 2013 NY Enterprise Technology Meetup Recap http://www.officeleasecenter.com/articles/january-15th-2013-ny-enterprise-technology-meetup.html
