Big Data offers many opportunities for large enterprises to improve competitiveness and to create new, data-driven products. And it offers significant opportunities for IT professional career growth. But these opportunities to not come without risks for the individual and organization. Big data is potentially transformative for some industries and those that cannot or will not adapt may face extinction. Furthermore, big data projects are inherently ground breaking and while many will prevail and lead to fame and glory for the big data pioneer, others will suffer ignominious defeat.

In this presentation we’ll look at the market forces driving big data, drill into the key technologies available to power a big data project and outline the attribute that allow big data projects to succeed.

After assessing the business imperatives that are driving big data projects we will survey the big data technology landscape which includes technologies such as the Hadoop ecosystem, Exadata, Machine Learning, collective intelligence and predictive analytics. We’ll conclude with recommendations on how to optimize your big data project, career and architectures.