Splice Machine CEO's Big Data Prediction's for 2016

Don’t expect to the momentum of the Big Data train to slow down anytime soon. Monte Zweben, co-founder and CEO of Splice Machine and executive chairman of RocketFuel, a publicly traded, full programmatic marketing platform, provides his insights on what to expect for Big Data for 2016.

Companies want to personalize cross-channel experiences based on real-time information (i.e., last 5 clicks of a mouse), not on day old data from their ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process. Beyond ecommerce, this means reducing the time it takes to complete the "data to insight to action" cycle. Using real-time or near real-time data, which is only a few seconds behind, is one of the biggest ways to speed that cycle up. 

This will dramatically improve personalization for customers, leading to increased conversion rates and ultimately revenue. Businesses will spot and react to trends faster, iterate and quickly outpace the competition and subsequently "leave them in the dust” when responding to data in the moment. 

Map Reduce is quite esoteric. Its slow, batch nature and high level of complexity can make it unattractive for many enterprises. Spark, because of its speed, is much more natural, mathematical, and convenient for programmers. Spark will reinvigorate Hadoop, and in 2016, nine out of every 10 projects on Hadoop will be Spark-related projects.

Much how Big Data was in the 90s, in 2016, every company will want to get on the machine learning bandwagon, but without the right people, many won’t have the expertise to do it. Expect to see the development of turnkey databases that allow developers to build predictive models without having a Ph.D.

2016 will be the year of the Big Data application, such as the Big Data digital marketing app, or Big Data medical app, or the Big Data telematic system. In 2016, expect to see 100 application companies certify their apps on a scale out SQL RDBMS.

Although spinning disks help us scale our data growth, it takes too much time to get the data off the disk. With SSD, there are no moving parts, much like being in memory, so the process of getting the exact data you need is extremely fast. In 2016, all new applications will use SSDs and spinning disks will become a thing of the past.