Strata + Hadoop World, Recapped

DataRobot attended Strata + Hadoop World in New York the week of September 26, and the fog has finally lifted enough to reflect on the annual conference that gathers thousands of data practitioners in one place for a whirlwind week of cross-industry knowledge exchange, training, tutorials, and networking.

One thing that really stood out to me this year is how much the conference, which really represents companies’ adoption and use of big data technologies like Apache Hadoop, has evolved over the past few years. A mere three years ago, the Hadoop-centric show was mainly dedicated to helping organizations understand what Hadoop and related big data technologies are and how to take advantage of them. Attendees were cutting-edge engineers leading the forefront of adoption, many from small technology and media firms who were taking a risk by going all-in on big data.

This year, the conference looked much different. Every large enterprise has a big data strategy in place now, and thus attendees to the conference represent business analysts, data professionals and IT practitioners spanning the Fortune 100. The focus of sessions is how to maximize the value of investments in big data and Hadoop. It’s assumed that attendees are already up and running on the technology — now it’s time to take those use cases to the next level.

The announcement DataRobot made, that our customers have developed more than 100 million models using the SaaS version of the DataRobot enterprise machine learning platform, makes perfect sense in this regard. Companies have big data, and the infrastructure in place to capture and manage it, so it’s no surprise that more and more of them are employing predictive analytics and machine learning techniques to derive value from it. And with the level of automation DataRobot brings to the table, it’s no wonder the platform is seeing great momentum.

Likewise, we shouldn’t have been surprised that the “Data Science for Executives” session delivered by our founders, Jeremy Achin and Tom de Godoy, was standing room only. (We aren’t complaining!) The focus of this session was to help attendees understand how executives can identify opportunities to optimize their business using machine learning. Given the noticeable shift in demographics of conference attendees to mainstream line-of-business folk, I was pleased to see that the topic was well-aligned and well-received. (To learn more about the session, click here.)

If you would like more on the topic of data science for executives, check out a recording of our recent webinar with Tom de Godoy – “.”

To see where you can visit DataRobot on the road, keep an eye on our Events page!