KDnuggets Exclusive: Interview with Anjul Bhambhri, VP of Big Data Products at IBM
KDnuggets talks with Anjul Bhambhri, IBM’s Vice President of Big Data Products about Big Data Trends, developing the Big Data capabilities in-house vs. outsourcing, five crucial steps to adopting a success big data strategy and advice for beginners.
Twitter: @AnjulBhambhri
Here is my interview with her:
Anmol Rajpurohit: 1. IBM has clearly been one of the leaders in Big Data industry with ahead-of-times technology such as Watson. According to you, what key trends will drive the growth of Big Data industry for the next 2-3 years and what factors will play a critical role in the success of Big Data projects?
AR: 2. One of the biggest Big Data implementation issues is to decide between developing the Big Data capabilities in-house vs. outsourcing. What are the key factors in this decision and what selection criteria you suggest to evaluate Big Data outsourcing vendors?
A big data platform has attributes such as the ability to perform quick and accurate analytics, can leverage and enhance existing technologies in use such as open source Hadoop technology; and is cloud-enabled to scale as needed while optimizing resources. Keeping these principles in mind, managing big data and deploying the IT infrastructure to support it, should no longer be a cumbersome process. In this new era, simple, easy-to-use tools and platforms exist that can help organizations make sense of the new data-driven norm.
AR:3. What do you see as the biggest challenges towards successful deployment of Big Data projects? What advice would you give to firms who are trying to make Big Data an integral part of their business strategy?
- Defining the challenge and understanding the opportunity that big data presents for the organization. Establish the larger end goal – whether it is cost savings, increased ROI, or reduced risk when beginning a big data program.
- Discovering the data that needs to be analyzed and where it is located. Depending on the industry, different types of data are more critical to the organization than others. These various types of data need to be located and analyzed in order to obtain critical insights. Also, a federated approach to big data, which is taking the analytics where the data resides, is a faster and more cost effective than stuffing all the data inside a data warehouse.
- Obtaining the business buy-in– big data is no longer just an IT issue, it affects the entire business as a whole so it is necessary to start with the C-suite and get them to apply big data to growth opportunities. Show them the larger implications that their data presents for the organization. Map out potential savings and increased ROI that will impact the bottom line and future growth of the business.
- Establishing the right technology which was discussed previously and lastly
- Ensuring the right team and skills are in place. Having people with the right skills is equally as important as having the right technology. Because the data is only as good as the value it provides – so you need people with the expertise to find the insights in the data. Building out a data scientist role or data science team, and the adoption of the Chief Data Office role, will foster collaboration among the organization and provide ‘champions of data’ whom can derive the maximum business value from their organization’s data.
AR: 4. Data Scientist has been termed as the sexiest job of 21st century. Do you agree? What advice would you give to people aspiring a long career in Data Science?
There are resources out there for students and professionals who want to explore a career in data. IBM is very committed to training tomorrow’s data workers and has partnerships with over 1,000 universities around the world to prepare students with big data skills. Going beyond just technology donation, IBM supports faculty with curriculum materials, case study projects based on real business challenges, and IBM data scientists who guest lecture in classes. IBM also launched http://BigDataUniversity.com, an online educational site of over 100,000 members run by new and experienced Hadoop, Big Data and DB2 users who want to learn, contribute with course materials, or look for job opportunities.
AR: 5. What book (or article) have you read recently and liked?
AB: "And the Mountains Echoed" by Khaled Hosseini.