November CHUG: Agile, Nimble, Tenacious: Modern data analytics with Apache Spark

Summary:

Spark is quickly becoming the Swiss Army Knife of the data guru tool belt. Plug and play capabilities with Hadoop, native SQL, stream processing, and an ever growing Machine Learning library are enabling data experts to bring their own skillsets to data problems at scale without sacrificing performance or functionality.

In this talk we discuss our experiences using Hadoop and Apache Spark to not only deliver impactful insights, but also transform the way our clients deliver data analytics to their business customers. Spark is enabling data analytics organizations to break out of legacy skill silos, delivering results faster and more consistently.

We will cover an introductory overview of Spark, compelling reasons for Spark adoption, Spark’s impacts on analytic organizations, and a SOP (standard operating procedure) for modern data analytics from discovery to operation. This will include case studies from Healthcare, Banking, Products and Social Media. Spark is making a transformative impact on how these organizations process, analyze, and take action with their data.

Speaker's Bio:

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/a/3/b/4/600_444101908.jpeg

Nick Lang is a Senior Consultant at Clarity Solution Group, the largest consultancy in the U.S. focused solely on data analytics.

Nick has been responsible for delivering comprehensive information strategies, business-focused discovery analytics and full-lifecycle implementations across the healthcare, finance, and social media spaces. He is a full stack engineer focusing on problems spanning data integration, analytics, and visualization. Nick’s project work and thought leadership are industry recognized including a 2014 Teradata EPIC Award for Big Data Intelligence.

Nick is currently working with Facebook on their next generation data analytics ecosystem. Like all of us, Nick is a data geek at heart, and encourages you to watch this embarrassing video of him demonstrating Tableau and R as posted on Tableau’s 3 minute win blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N10FsjDPORs