Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, and Pivotal come together to discuss Apache Spark

TOPIC: “Top Hadoop Distribution Vendors – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, and Pivotal – come together to discuss Apache Spark"

Many are saying Apache Spark is the next wave of innovation in Big Data – extending the capabilities of Hadoop and providing a unified platform for batch and real-time processing. The Open Source community is excited and supportive as evidence by Spark’s recent promotion to a full fledge Apache project in February of 2014. Big Data vendor leaders are responding by introducing Spark’s capabilities into their architecture. Come join us for a lively panel discussion between the top Hadoop distribution vendors – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, and Pivotal – to hear their vision, strategy, and capabilities around Apache Spark. This will be a rare opportunity to see these four leading vendors on one panel, hear from their experts, and get their insight on best practices, real use cases, and solutions around Spark implementation.

Networking starts at 6pm and our meetup will get underway at 6:30. More details to come! Please save the date.

Speaker/Panelist Bios (this time in reverse alphabetical order!)

Dan Baskette is a Principal Community Engineer with Pivotal. His role is a combination of field and engineering enablement in which he serves as a product specialist to the field and provides direct feedback to the engineering organization to enable rapid product improvement cycles. He also supports proof of concept work for engineering to help prove out ideas and new potential products. Prior to Pivotal, Dan spent the last 10 years working at EMC Corporation. His last role was working in the EMC CTO Office as a Hadoop and Big Data specialist where he assisted in proving out large scale data architectures for large web-based and telecommunications customers. Before that, he spent 6 years at Sun Microsystems where he rode the Dot in Dot Com bubble to it’s peak before leaping off for a new adventure. Dan graduated in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, and enjoys spending as much time as possible back in the nearby Smoky Mountains.

Keys Botzum is a Senior Principal Technologist with MapR Technologies. He has over 15 years of experience in large scale distributed system design. At MapR his primary responsibility is working with customers as a consultant, but he also teaches classes, contributes to documentation, and works with MapR engineering. Previously he was a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM and a respected author of many articles on WebSphere Application Server as well as a book. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Casey Stella is a Principal Architect with Hortonworks with a special focus on Data Science. He spends his time with a variety of clients, large and small, mentoring and helping them use Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/) to solve their problems. He was an architect and software engineer at Explorys, a startup spun out of the Cleveland Clinic, focusing on data mining and medical informatics using Hadoop and HBase. Prior to that, he has worked on a number of ventures across a number of industries, including scientific programming in the oil industry, writing scalable server infrastructure for VOIP and working on metadata repositories at Oracle. All of these things have one thing in common, they deal with large amounts of data. In a galaxy far, far away and a long time ago, he was a graduate student at Texas A&M in the Department of Mathematics.

Ted Malaska is a Sr. Solutions Architect with Cloudera. He has spent the last four years working with Hadoop and supporting over 40 clients with their Big Data implementations, some with over 200 clusters. He is the co-author of the up-and-coming O’Reilly book "Hadoop Application Architecture" which will feature Apache Spark in three of the nine chapters. He is also an active contributor to nine Hadoop Ecosystem projects including two minor contributions to Spark. At Cloudera, he has been very involved with multiple Spark applications for customers and he has gained experience with Spark, Spark-GraphX, and Spark Streaming.

Parking and Transit

Central Library is located just a few blocks walking distance between the Ballston Metro and the Virginia Square Metro.

Free parking is available in the parking garage and surface lots near Central Library. There is no time limit after 6pm.

Additional transit options: http://www.carfreediet.com/pages/car-free-diet-partners/transportation-options/?pid=589