Thursday 30 June we have meet in Bucharest to discuss about Big Data, Analytics and Cloud. Trends, benefits, perspectives, disruptive effects, but more important we discussed about innovation and profitability. Conference was organized by iBusiness and Agora Group, the most important IT publishing and media groups, with more than 20 years tradition on the Romanian and international industry, with support of National Association for Information Systems Security.

The main discussion panel brought together a number of participants from the research, government organization, consultancy, and solutions providers represented by: Mrs. Doina Banciu – general manager ICI (National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics), Toma Campeanu – CEO ANSSI (National Association for Information Systems Security),  Constantin Ene – director ANCPI (National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration), Marius Nicolae – Manager IT  Advisory Ernst & Young Romania, Radu Crahmaliuc, independent analyst & founder cloud☁mania, Razvan Ionescu – Account și Partner Development Manager SAS Romania, Maryo Fiscutean – Project Manager Infoworld, Petrica Barbieru – general manager ProSys, and Razvan Savu – Business Solutions Manager Ymens.

Together with Mihaela Gorodcov – general manager iBusiness Romania, I had the honor to moderate the main discussions panel.

Big Data is perhaps the most circulated technological concept nowadays. The amount of data that accumulates every day is impressive. Recently, the renowned supercomputer Watson began to “be fed” with more than 10 000 documents / month (in a huge project involving six universities in the US and Canada) in order to learn how to detect cyber threats of data structured. Also, Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books per second.

Thus, it is estimated that by 2020 the volume of data will be 25 zettabytes (10 to 21 power!) Which raises the technological challenges but also huge social and economic impact. 90% of the data that exist today were created in the last 2 years!

Big Data (BI + Analytics) – is a buzzword. A solution is not exactly cheap to install in a company. It is at the same time, IT concept already marks the present and will define the future, that reality translated into a phrase that is already beginning to distinguish between economic entities of success and those who find themselves ever more deeply steeped in difficulties due to mismanagement the large volume of data, be it areas such as agriculture, environment, transport or telecommunications, utilities, defense etc.

Some say Romania is not a market large enough for Big Data Analytics data volumes needed to achieve those results really relevant in terms of increasing the profitability of a company. Plus that the implementation of such a solution costs money and not a few. The main panel debate confirmed the reality is other..  Big Data is that IT concept of profitable growth from which everyone can benefit. This is because there alongside solutions, IT services. Those services that offer capabilities to anyone currently exploring the benefits of Big Data at much reduced costs. Those services are termed as analysts sounded another long term: Cloud Computing. The combination of Big Data and Cloud Computing can represent the companies in Romania, one of the most beneficial ways of shaping the future.

During cloud☁mania’s intervention, I presented two very actual and interesting example related to the Big Data Analytics applicability.

UEFA Euro 2016 – predicting the winner has always been an important issue especially during the popular football championships. One of this prediction issue was based on analytics function of popular research engine. Bing, uses a complicated algorithm that draws from social media, surges in searches on its platform and team performances in the past to make predictions about the winners of certain future competitions, tournaments or championships. Bing has been impressively accurate in the past, correctly predicting the outcome of the FIFA World Cup, Cricket World Cup, Oscars and even the Scottish referendum. Yahoo was also tasked with predicting the winner of Euro 16, drawing from Yahoo Sport and the multitude of activity on social media site Tumblr. But this year, nobody predicted early exit of Great Britain team, after the historical match with Iceland team… The big prediction was a great final between British and Spain teams…

Wimbledon 2016 – Statistics and analytics have been a big feature of grand slam tennis for some years now. But what’s new this year is Watson. IBM’s flagship AI-driven analytics platform has been tasked with crunching through the hundreds of thousands of social media and online posts which the event generates. According a Forbes article, it’s mission is to find the stories that fans are most engaged with, and drive creation of the sort of content that they most want to see. And crucially, for the first time this year thanks to Watson’s machine learning capabilities, this will be a predictive process, rather than an attempt to piggyback trends once they occur.