How Big Data Is Changing IT and Bringing Out The Vote

One of the most interesting stories to come out of the presidential election was the use of big data analytics to help campaign workers to bring out the vote. Both candidates used the technology. Project Narwhal was the Obama team’s effort. It was used to connect previously separate databases so that information on potential voters was accessible to campaign workers. They used the information to target voters with specific issues before the election and during the election they used it to determine who had not yet voted and do last minute outreach.

Big Data Changes the Process
The angle that makes this fascinating is that the information was there before, but it wasn’t accessible in a comprehensive way. The available data was the result of many siloed data gathering efforts, used for specific purposes over the past years. The role that big data analytics played was in bringing disparate information together in a comprehensive way. This meant that campaign workers could draw from information in sources such as volunteer-management programs, campaign finance and budgeting tools, voter-file interfaces and especially social media to gain a bigger picture of the voter’s profile and to guide the campaign’s success. As a result canvassers weren’t dispatched to knock on the doors of people who were already supporters of Obama, and if a donor had given the maximum contribution, instead of getting email for money they got an email asking them to volunteer.

The way that they did it was a lesson in the creative use of technology. Instead of hiring a consulting company, the Obama campaign pulled together a team of technologists who brought a range of skills and experience to get the job done. Using various programming languages and APIs they built a set of services that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for their applications. This made it possible to quickly develop new applications and to integrate existing ones into the system. As a result they were able to create a dashboard that provided access to a set of tools to use across all of their data sets and drive each step of the campaign process. The application included an analytics programs called Dreamcatcher that was developed to microtarget voters based on sentiments in social media text. Using this tool they could determine which way the vote was going and where to focus their resources. For more information on the technology see, Built to Win: Deep Inside Obama's Campaign Tech.

How the QFabric System Enables a High-Performance, Scalable Big Data Infrastructure

Big Data Analytics is a trend that is changing the way businesses gather intelligence and evaluate their operations. Driven by a combination of technology innovation, maturing open source software, commodity hardware, ubiquitous social networking and pervasive mobile devices, the rise of big data has created an inflection point across all verticals, such as financial services, public sector and health care, that must be addressed in order for organizations to do business effectively and economically.

Analytics Drive Business Decisions
Big data has recently become a top area of interest for IT organizations due to the dramatic increase in the volume of data being created and due to innovations in data gathering techniques that enable the synthesis and analysis of the data to provide powerful business intelligence that can often be acted upon in real time. For example, retailers can experience increased operational margins by responding to customer’s buying patterns and in the health industry, big data can enhance outcomes in diagnosis and treatment.

The big data phenomenon brings up a challenging question to CIOs and CTOs: What is the big data infrastructure strategy?  A unique characteristic of big data is that, does not work well in traditional Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) data stores or with structured query language (SQL) analysis tools.  Big data requires a flat, horizontally scalable database, accessed with unique query tools that work in real time. As a result of this requirement IT must invest in new technologies and architectures to utilize the power of real-time data streams.

My 2011 Update and Thoughts on What’s Coming in 2012

An Eventful Year with Many Changes
It’s been an eventful year for me and I thought an update was in order. On the work front there have been a lot of changes. I joined Juniper Networks in November. I’m focused on technical marketing for data center and cloud. This is a return for me as I was at Juniper before moving to Cisco in 2007. It’s interesting how the world turns, and I’m excited to be back.

When I was interviewing at Juniper I was asked what attracted me to the jobs that I had. Of course there are many things, but being a techie what stands out for me is working on market leading products and I’ve been fortunate to have worked on some firsts. At Lucent it was the Portmaster (formerly Livingston), the first digital remote access server. At Redback it was the SMS (Subscriber Management System), the first broadband aggregation platform. At Entone it was a suite of products for IPTV that preceded FIOS and UVerse. When I first went to Juniper in 2005 it was the Peribit WX, the first WAN Optimization devices. At Cisco I got into cloud computing and marketed data center solutions including virtualized network services that ran on the UCS compute platform. At VCE I marketing the first pre-engineered converged infrastructure platform for private cloud computing.

So the question is what brought me to Juniper? Working at a company that continues to innovate in the networking space was a big draw. The opportunity to be on a newly formed team that is focused on critical areas of the network and to be the lead for data center and cloud computing was important. My role in technical marketing is to bridge the gap between the capabilities of the networking equipment and the value delivered to the business in terms of application performance and availability. I believe that the network design is critical to delivering a superior user experience and enabling applications architected for the cloud. As I looked at how applications are becoming more complex and more highly distributed I saw how Juniper’s innovative QFabric switching platform was ideally suited to meet the requirements of this trend in application architecture. So the short answer is the opportunity to market data center solutions based on QFabric.

Here are a few areas of interest that I expect to be writing about in the coming months.