Sometimes, just sometimes, what happens in Las Vegas shouldn’t stay in Las Vegas. That was clearly the case this week when TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn took the stage to talk about the myths and realities of Big Data. In Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich or Pretty, Quinn provided his perspective on Big Data based on years of experience in some of the biggest data environments around, like FedEx, Nielsen, and others.
Forget the ‘big’ part for a moment, think about variety
Quinn pointed out that most customers are not struggling with ‘big’ data but are instead still struggling with data. In Quinn’s view, it is the complex interactions between customer data sets that cause the majority of the issues. Success depends more on piecing together different data sets across wildly different applications and systems, with variety of data being the key.
In Quinn’s opinion, solving this data ‘jigsaw puzzle’ is often overlooked and tools like Hadoop, while clearly in focus, is just one tool in the toolbelt and can be a clumsy tool when dealing with real-life complexity.
In commercials, on blogs, and on the Internet, mobile companies advertise to get their phones in customers’ hands. And it’s working. Customers become strongly attached to their chosen brand of mobile phone, almost to the point of fighting to prove their choice is the best. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, our lives revolve around the little devices that do much more than make a phone call. We are attached to our phones and willing to defend them.
It used to be that companies drove traffic solely with a new product launch. While that’s still largely the case for how marketing cycles work, we are in an era of consumer event triggers where each product cycle is increasingly dictated per person. Why? Because new things launch every day and we are constantly inundated by all forms of outbound marketing messaging. There are very few things we need (not want) when they’re new. Sure, new things can be better, but when we have a problem and need a solution, we don’t care when the solution was created; we care that it’s available at our fingertips.
Getting the right information on demand is an eternal problem of today’s knowledge workers, and will only grow. Lack of knowledge causes a delay in decision-making, and ultimately leads to bad decisions. This is the essence of the 
In more than one instance, opposite poles attract each other, from marriages to difficult colleagues at work. One person is usually organized, predictable and manageable, and the other one can turn out to be lazy, moody, or totally unpredictable, but these parings often end up being the best matches. The same is true between the marriage of something standardized and automated like BPM and something as messy as social media. The knot to tie them together is people. Engaging people to collaborate and be a part of the process is the secret to the happy marriage.
Whether it’s infographics, maps, flow charts, or other design-driven diagrams, data visualization is now seen as the preferred way to interact with data. In fact, infographics and other visualizations have been some of the most shared images in social media history. Why? They’re easy to understand, quick, and beautiful. They engage.
Just a few short years ago, even some of the smartest visionaries went on the record dismissing cloud. But times change and so have their opinions. Even cloud’s most vocal opponents are starting to realize that cloud computing offers something entirely new: the ability for even the smallest player to scale up an idea with little capital and at the lowest operational cost possible. This is a complete reversal of the concepts that have driven the world since industrialization began.
I asked Gene Kim, researcher and co-author of The Phoenix Project, five thought-provoking, high-level questions about how DevOps and Platform as a Service (PaaS) can benefit 21st-century enterprises right now and in the long term.
Continuing this series of five key questions on the topic of DevOps (see 
