Talksum and the Skolkovo Foundation Helping to Change the Future Landscape of the IT Industry

Posted on May, 15th 2013 in Big Data, Data Management, Industry News · Write a comment

Based on our new approach to high-speed data processing and management solutions, Talksum was recently selected by Russia’s Skolkovo Foundation to help change the future of the IT industry. The Skolkovo Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in September 2010 by the Russian government with an objective to accelerate transformation of Russia from a resource-intensive to an innovation-based economy. This is an honor for us as we are now on par with 28 of the world’s most successful corporations in the world, including Boeing, Cisco Systems, EADS, GE, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens, Nokia, and others who have also signed R&D partnership agreements with the Foundation.

Igor Bogachev, executive director of the Information Technologies (IT) Cluster, Skolkovo Foundation, put it this way, “The volume of data in corporate business grows by 30 to 40 percent every year according to different sources. The Big Data problem has been already in the room for some time. We in Skolkovo do not neglect this major trend and give special support to the startups working in this field. The goal is to build the Big Data co-innovation sub-cluster in Skolkovo with the companies like Talksum and other residents. I trust that Talksum is one of the companies that will change the future landscape of the IT industry.”

The Foundation is overseeing the creation of the Skolkovo Innovation Center composed of companies and start-ups, developing innovative technologies (currently numbering almost 1000), a Technopark, the Skolkovo Institute of Technology (Skoltech), a new graduate research University established in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Skolkovo city, located near Moscow. Together these entities will establish a vibrant eco-system of technology innovation and entrepreneurship.

Click here to see the entire Skolkovo press release.

 

A Recap of the Big Data Innovation Summit, London

Posted on May, 8th 2013 in Big Data, Data Management, Presentations, Technology · Write a comment

Last week, we had the pleasure of attending the Big Data Innovation Summit in London as an attendee, a presenter, a chairman, and an exhibitor! In addition, we announced our flagship product – the Talksum Data Stream Router. All in all, a great week!

First, I’d like to thank all of you who attended our presentation, “A New Approach to Data Management.” We are excited about the future of Big Data and the opportunity we had to share our vision with you, in particular our approach to data management and analytics, which focuses on speed, simplicity, and cost efficiency. Big Data initiatives need more than just new storage platforms and BI solutions. They need to be real time to keep pace with data demands, simple to avoid specialized skills and custom codes, and cost effective to maintain low overhead and offer greater value.

Those are the ingredients built into the Talksum Data Stream Router. For those who missed our presentation, we showed our solution in our booth and discussed various use cases, including those in service delivery, industrial and automotive sensors, financial tracking and analytics, healthcare HL7 compliance, and biogenetics research.

If you didn’t make it to the Summit and would like a copy of the presentation, fill out the Talksum Contact Us form and request the presentation in the “Nature of Interest” box.

At the Summit, it was also fun to listen and discuss innovation with other experts in the field, including those from CERN, Hortonworks, BT, Pfizer, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, and many others.

We are already looking forward to the next Summit!

Thoughts on “Big Data’s Second Act”

Posted on Jan, 4th 2013 in Big Data, Industry News · Write a comment

A recent article by Holly Moore Haynes of Silver Lake Sumeru on CNNMoney is an interesting read for a few reasons. First and foremost, she points out something too many miss – that “Big Data” isn’t about any one emerging set of tools displacing everyone else, rather, “we are witnessing the evolution of enterprise intelligence.” She calls it “Big Data’s Second Act.”  We agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly, and dig the Second Act concept. Not only is data “bigger” (3 V’s and all that), but the expectation that companies need to have responsive, reactive data driven practices at the core of their operations is becoming a must-have, not an esoteric goal toward which to strive.

That said, we think she left a few things unsaid that are really important. While we agree with Ms. Haynes that intelligence applications for business users will be really key, you can’t overlook the importance of core infrastructure technology changes that will be needed to accommodate this Second Act.

In one of the sources Ms. Haynes references, IDC makes some important observations, some of which are laid out in this press release, and some of which you’ll need to get your own copy of the full report:

  • While software and services will constitute a larger share of overall revenue, growth rates for infrastructure technologies is projected to be higher.
  • “Big Data in Motion” and the high speed messaging technologies needed to support it are one of the key aspects of Big Data growth.
  • There’s a Big Data talent gap on both the IT and analytics expertise sides, representing a real opportunity for appliance offerings that make it easy to deploy and utilize next generation concepts in the data infrastructure space.

The bottom line is that there’s more than just some new data stores and cool BI tools out there on the horizon. There are fundamental changes to the core data management, data integration and enterprise information access processes on the way. Innovators who are poised to offer new, easy to deploy platforms to enable Big Data’s Second Act have a bright future, and we’d like to think we’re one of them.

Rsyslog and ZeroMQ

Posted on May, 30th 2012 in Uncategorized · Write a comment

As we get ready for the first deployments of our big data streaming platform, we’re pleased to announce another open source contribution. As we mentioned in our previous post, we’re big fans of Rsyslog. Well, we also have a lot of affection for a complementary component, ZeroMQ. As many probably know, ZeroMQ is a mature open-source high-speed message library, currently supporting bindings in about 30 languages. We use ZeroMQ as a component of our real-time data streaming solutions.

For any project using ZMQ, the ability to utilize centralized logging via syslog is desirable. We have created input and output plugins for Rsyslog that allow ZMQ messages to be put into Rsyslog, or output from Rsyslog. We built our plugins using the czmq library (https://github.com/zeromq/czmq), which sits atop the ZMQ API. This enabled us to support the latest version of ZMQ (3.1), and the older stable version (2.1). This library was chosen as it hides the differences in the ZMQ 2.1 vs 3.1 API, and allows our plugin to work in both environments. Prior work (https://github.com/aggregateknowledge/rsyslog-zeromq) was written directly on top of the ZMQ API, and doesn’t support the current version of ZMQ. The output plugin supports Rsyslog V6 config format, and there are example config settings here (TBD).

So, what do we allow you to do with the plugins?

  • BIND or CONNECT
  • Specify any number of worker threads
  • Specify thread affinities
  • Specify any zsockopt option
  • Input plugin supports SUB, PULL and XSUB
  • Output plugin supports PUB, PUSH and XPUB

Hammer on it! We want to see these plugins put through their paces. We are doing the same, and plan to continue to improve them over time.