“Today, you have companies like Zynga and Groupon that have built their businesses on real-time analytics and big data, but the megatrend over the next year-and-a-half is that companies like Gillette and Fidelity are going to get on board. In a year or two, you’ll be asking them about their analytics strategy, and how they’re using data to gain competitive advantage. … Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming.”
– Chris Lynch, ex-Vertica CEO
“In every area of science we are generating a petabyte of data, and unless we have the equivalent of the 21st-century microscope, with faster networks and the corresponding computing, we are stuck.”
– Dr. Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins
“Opening the source code up to the world under GPL v3 will attract contributors and customers from all over the world and put, what is essentially a South African product, on the world stage.”
– Andre Coetzee, founder and owner of Cubit, Africa’s largest open source project
“While other enterprise vendors will attempt to add cloud-like management layers to their existing proprietary data center virtualization products, we believe the biggest winners in the cloud era will be clouds built on a platform that is designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture, proven at scale in real production clouds, compatible with the Amazon architecture, and fully committed to open source.”
– Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM of cloud platforms, Citrix
“I think there will be three winners, maybe two. People don’t necessarily want to have their data shared across multiple different networks and merchants certainly want to have access to the most widely-used [mobile payment] platforms…. The universe will start off incredibly large and will compress down to three to four different platforms that work at tens of thousands of merchants.”
– Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR