Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

Jeffrey Needham

May 2013 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

Big data has more disruptive potential than any information technology developed in the past 40 years. As author Jeffrey Needham points out in this revealing book, big data can provide unprecedented visibility into the operational efficiency of enterprises and agencies.

Disruptive Possibilities provides an historically-informed overview through a wide range of topics, from the evolution of commodity supercomputing and the simplicity of big data technology, to the ways conventional clouds differ from Hadoop analytics clouds. This relentlessly innovative form of computing will soon become standard practice for organizations of any size attempting to derive insight from the tsunami of data engulfing them.

Replacing legacy silos—whether they’re infrastructure, organizational, or vendor silos—with a platform-centric perspective is just one of the big stories of big data. To reap maximum value from the myriad forms of data, organizations and vendors will have to adopt highly collaborative habits and methodologies.

Ratings and reviews

I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of the impact of big data on our world. The author does a great job of explaining complex concepts in a way that is easy to understand, and provides numerous examples of how big data is being used to revolutionize industries and society. The book is full of insights and thought-provoking ideas, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the power of data.

If you want to understand what big data and hadoop is all about then a definite read

Big brother is watching you and he is running hadoop ;-)

About the author

Jeff Needham is the founder of Scale Abilities, Inc., a Silicon Valley consulting firm, and does ecosystem platform engineering at Hortonworks in Palo Alto, California. With 25 years experience in both hardware and software engineering, he is a frequent writer and speaker on topics of database performance and scalability, platform engineering and Hadoop cluster technology. Customers appreciate Jeff's creative strategies for evaluating and implementing their big data initiatives.