Insights from the 4 April 2013 Government Big Data Forum: Part One

By Ryan Kamauff

On 4 April 2013, Carahsoft sponsored the Third Annual Government Big Data Forum. This post is the first in a series that seeks to capture key elements of the forum and keep the dialog going.

Over 350 Big Data leaders and decision-makers in the federal domain came together 4 April 2013 for our third Big Data gathering. The first was a formative meeting where we brought together people from across all three branches of government to discuss lessons learned and mission needs associated with Big Data. After that first session we launched our Weekly Government Big Data Newsletter as a way of keeping a baseline of information flowing between interested participants in the federal Big Data community. In 2012 we came together again and dove deeper into Big Data mission needs, gaps and success stories. This year we built on the previous two years by facilitating an interaction between and among Big Data thought leaders.

For context, here is the overall agenda:

Agenda

Speakers included many members of the government big data community from industry, academia and government. They included Donna Roy from DHS, Shawn Kingsberry from RATB, and Kirit Amin from the US Department of Commerce. The event was moderated by our own Bob Gourley. Abe Usher, CIO of the HumanGeo Group and Al Di Leonardo, President and CEO of the HumanGeo Group, and Fran Landolf led panels. Members of these panels were from a variety of organizations and roles, and gave great insight into big data and successes and failures and lessons in government.

Industry sponsors, participants in the expo and several speakers came from some of the greatest tech firms in the globe, including:

Cloudera, MarkLogic, Thetus, Datameer, IBM (Analyst Notebook), EMC, SAP, Recorded Future, Splunk, 10Gen, FlexAnalytics, Parabal, Optensity, VMware, Arista, VirtualInstruments, Qbase, Nutanix and Symantec

We will dive into the keynotes in the next post in the series and then tackle lessons from the panels. Till then, since a continuing conclusion of these events is that we need to keep a strong community, I’d like to invite you to take two actions towards that right now. First, to ensure you get all these and other reviews of Big Data topics in our Government Big Data Newsletter, a weekly report you can sign up for here. Second, join the Disruptive IT group on LinkedIn. This is a member’s only group of technology professionals that discuss issues and actions around Big Data and other hot technology topics. We will see you there.

Additional info on some of the key firms mentioned here follows:

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