It was a blatant plug. Mandy Chessell, IBM’s chief data officer had just delivered a keynote talk on open metadata and she was petitioning the audience to join her, or at least the ODPi, saying that “adoption is key to standards.” She has a point. For open metadata to become the de facto standard for the big data industry, it will need volume support and where better to get it than at a big data conference?
Dataworks 2018, held at the Estrel in Berlin, a large hotel and congress center on the edge of the Neukolln district in the south of the city should have been fertile ground for Chessell. The room was full of data geeks. How Erich Mielke, the head of the East German Stasi would have loved to mine their collective knowledge on handling large amounts of data. The irony is not lost, given the Berlin wall ran just a stone’s throw from the Estrel and the last person to be killed at the wall, Chris Geuffroy was shot scaling a fence between Treptow Park and Neukolln.
That’s history of course but managing big data remains a constant problem for businesses and organizations, especially as it moves between devices, datacenters and the public cloud. As organizations evolve, their adoption of cloud strategies varies widely. Interestingly, a quick interactive poll of the Dataworks audience revealed that 35 percent had no interest in moving data to the cloud. It wasn’t expected but then there is a lot of uncertainty about security and how to manage it if it is in the cloud.