Photo credit: Impact Venture Capital

By Terry Daffin (PMP), Shyanne Long (CSM), and Lucie-Anne Radimsky (CSPO)

KAI Partners was in full force at Impact Venture Capital’s recent Impact Global Venture Summit!

Our organization thrives on innovation and partnership, so the summit was a great opportunity to meet with local entrepreneurs, businesses, and funders of next generation technology in Sacramento.

While the idea of “global” attached event in Sacramento might raise some eyebrows, we can assure you that the event lived up to its geographic expectations—we met with people from over 20 different countries who are currently living and innovating in the Sacramento area.

The innovative organizations in attendance at the summit represented industries such as agriculture, construction, IoT, VR products for the military, Blockchain, education, and entertainment.

What Sacramento may lack in density, we make up for in diversity, which is critical to long-term growth and success of any organization and/or region. The Impact Global Venture Summit was a good reminder that although Sacramento has always been top of mind due to its proximity to political power as the State’s capital, its popularity is starting to grow.

Rising costs in the Bay Area; our region’s thriving healthcare, construction, and agriculture sectors; the proximity to research institutions; and a skilled workforce and space spurring a resurgence of manufacturing all play an important role in attracting entrepreneurs and businesses from around the world.

Take for example autonomous vehicles, which is a priority for the Sacramento Urban Technology Lab, led by Louis Stewart of the City of Sacramento. Mr. Stewart presented this concept at the summit and discussed the initiative’s far-reaching implications in terms of raising our profile globally to Asia and Europe, including work-study visits to Germany and discussing with China the possibility of a training university co-locating in our region. Louis was joined by the CEO of SMUD, who have announced they will contribute $15 million toward the creation of a California Mobility Center, which will play a pivotal role in redefining SMUD’s future beyond selling electrons.

This topic was reiterated by Jan Geldmacher of Sprint, who discussed the rising importance of networks supporting the technologies of the future through 5G. He detailed Sprint’s latest project, self-driving robotic charging stations, which will service parked cars in heavily dense urban areas where static charging stations are uncommon.

It was empowering to have strong businesswomen in attendance and speaking on panels. During the “Women in Tech” panel, it was noted that in the future, there will not need to be a separate segment and panel just for women. Hopefully, it will be a given that women will not only be included, but also ingrained in technology, innovation, and all things business related. One panelist who stood out was Brissa Quiroz, the Director of the Valley Industry Partnership (VIP) Program at Fresno State University. With a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering, Ms. Quiroz expressed her passion for fostering students interests in STEM programs, especially those who come from low income and minority groups. Ms. Quiroz made it clear that she hopes to get more girls into STEM programs and keep their interest thriving.

The event also included Epic Office Hours for current and future startup founders to ask questions and receive advice from some of the area’s most successful founders and investors on what it takes to succeed in this new ecosystem of innovation and disruption.

KAI Partners was pleased to be one of over 1,000 attendees enjoying this premiere event supporting entrepreneurship and innovation in the Sacramento region. Did you attend the Impact Global Venture Summit? What were you most excited to learn?

About the Authors: Terry Daffin is the Community Manager of KAI Partners’ coworking and collaboration space, The WorkShop Sacramento. Lucie-Anne Radimsky KAI Partners’ Business Development Lead, covering all divisions of KAI Partners, including training and managed IT services. Shyanne Long is an Associate Business Analyst supporting business intelligence and research.

By Sid Richardson, PMP, CSM

I have been in the data warehousing practice since 1994, when I implemented a successful Distributed Data Warehouse for a flagship banking product, followed by co-developing Oracle’s Data Warehouse Methodology. In August 1997, I was invited to speak at the Data Warehouse Institute Conference in Boston.

Over the years, I’ve researched and implemented what I would consider some small scale/junior Big Data systems. I have an interest in Big Data and wanted to share my learnings on Big Data and Hadoop as a high-level overview for the layperson / busy executive.

What is Big Data?

Big Data defines an IT approach used to process the enormous amounts of available information from social media, emails, log files, text, camera/video, sensors, website clickstreams, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, audio, and other sources of information in combination with existing computer files and database data.

In the 1990s, three major trends occurred to make up Big Data: “Big” Transaction Data, “Big” Interaction Data, and “Big” Data Processing.

In 2001, Big Data was defined by Doug Laney, former Vice President and Distinguished Analyst with the Gartner Chief Data Officer (CDO) research and advisory team. Mr. Laney defined Big Data by the “three Vs”:

1. 1. Velocity – Speed of incoming data feeds.
   2. Variety – Unstructured data, social media, documents, images.
   3. Volume – Large quantities of data.

IBM decided to add two more Vs:

• 1. Veracity – Accuracy of the data.
  2. Value – To define Big Data.

Why do we need Big Data?

In a nutshell: We need Big Data because there is a lot of data to process, for example:

• Google needs to index the entire web—daily.
• Yahoo! needs to perform similar data intensive processing.
• Facebook is home to approximately 845 million users and about 40+ billion photos.
• According to The Economist, in 2010, Walmart handled more than 1 million customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress.

Also noted by The Economist, the abundance of data and tools to capture, process, and share all this information already exceeds the available storage space (and the number of eyes on the planet to review and analyze it all!)

According to Forbes’s 2018 article, “How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read,” there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. And, over the last two years alone, 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.

Clearly, the creation of data is expanding at an astonishing pace—from the amount of data being produced to the way in which it’s re-structured for analysis and used. This trend presents enormous challenges, but it also presents incredible opportunities.

You’re probably thinking, alright, I get the big data thing, but why couldn’t data warehouses perform this role? Well, data warehouses are large, complex, and expensive projects that typically run approximately 12-18 month-long durations with high failure rates (The failure rate of data warehouses across all industries is high—Gartner once estimated that as many as 50 percent of data warehouse projects would have only limited acceptance or fail entirely).

A new approach to handle Big Data was born: Hadoop.

What is Hadoop?

In a nutshell, Hadoop is a Java-based framework governed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that initially addressed the ‘Volume’ and ‘Variety’ aspects of Big Data and provided a distributed, fault-tolerant, batched data processing environment (one record at a time, but designed to scale to Petabyte-sized file processing).

Hadoop was created out of a need to substantially reduce the cost of storage for massive volumes of data for analysis and does so by emulating a distributed parallel processing environment by networking many cheap, existing commodity processors and storage together, rather than using dedicated hardware and storage solutions.

Why Hadoop?

• Eighty percent of the world’s data is unstructured, meaning it cannot fit neatly into a database. Video data is an example of this—most businesses don’t have the capability or resources to analyze this data.
• Before Hadoop, data storage was expensive. Hadoop, however, lets you store as much data as you want in whatever form you need, simply by adding more servers to a Hadoop cluster.
• Hadoop’s approach makes data storage cheaper than before; what made Hadoop so popular was the creation of massive volumes of storage for analysis.

The Challenges with Hadoop

There is a limited understanding about Hadoop across the IT industry. Hadoop has operational limitations and performance challenges—you need to resort to several extended components to make it work and to make it reliable. And, Hadoop is becoming more fragmented, pulled by different commercial players trying to leverage their own solutions.

In summary…

The Hadoop Framework addresses a number of previous challenges facing the processing of Big Data for analysis. The explosion in deployment of data capture devices across all industries world-wide necessitated a more cost-effective way to store and access the massive volumes of data accumulating by the second!

I hope this blog post has provided you with a better understanding of some key Big Data and Hadoop concepts and technologies. Have you worked with Big Data and/or Hadoop? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

P.S. If you have gotten this far and are curious where the name Hadoop comes from, here you go! The name ‘Hadoop’ was coined by one of the sons of Doug Cutting, a software designer and advocate and creator of open-source search technology. Mr. Cutting’s son gave the name ‘Hadoop’ to his toy elephant and Mr. Cutting used the name for his open source project because it was easy to pronounce.

About the Author: Mr. Richardson’s passion is Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Master Data Management and Data Architectures. He has helped Fortune 500 companies in the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia lead large-scale corporate system and data initiatives and teams to success. His experience spans 30 years in the Information Technology space, specifically with experience in data warehousing, business intelligence, information management, data migrations, converged infrastructures and recently Big Data. Mr. Richardson’s industry experience includes: Finance and Banking, government, utilities, insurance, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, large-scale engineering and transportation sectors.

By Terry Daffin

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Golden Sierra Workforce Tech Forum: Occupations & Skills in an Automated World, hosted by Valley Vision and Golden Sierra Workforce Board.

Valley Vision “…inspires leaders to think big and collaborate on bold, long-term solutions that improve people’s lives and Golden Sierra’s Workforce Board, “…is an industry-led board of directors who identify and solve problems within key economic sectors in the tri-county region (Placer, El Dorado and Alpine).”

As the Project Manager for KAI Partners’ KAIP Academy and the Community Manager for coworking and incubation space The WorkShop – Sacramento, I was especially interested in hearing firsthand what employers are looking for in terms of workforce development for their organization.

There were many great panelists at the forum, including Sean Moss, Senior Estimator and Project Manager for McGuire and Hester; Gordon Rogers, Project Principal of the Owen Group; Annette Smith-Dohring, Workforce Development Manager for Sutter Health; Bernadette Williams, CMI Operations Manager at VSP; and Joseph Taylor, Assistant Professor at CSU Sacramento.

Each panelist was asked to describe what they believe the biggest educational need is for graduating students entering the workforce. Here’s a sampling of what they said:

• Gap in technical skilled labor—employees are either highly skilled/specialized or they have little technical skills
• Up-skilling; providing skills training on the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence to an existing workforce
• Critical thinking skills; under-preparedness upon graduation

I left the forum with the question, “What can we do to close these gaps?” As a training provider, it’s clear we need to help industry and education align their efforts so that the workforce can stay updated on new methods, software/programming languages, and other emerging skills.

Here are a few ways to stay on top of digitalization and close the skills gap:

1. Industry and education leaders should seek out training programs that will prepare students for critical thinking, data and business analytics, problem solving, and soft skills necessary to enter the workforce and immediately become productive.
2. Students should be encouraged to seek out internships in work-based learning opportunities (especially those that provide educational units for their participation).
3. Employees should be encouraged to widen their professional development by taking certification courses (especially those that provide professional development units).

There is a lot we can do to close the skills gap and promote workforce development in our region. KAIP Academy is excited to offer training courses and programs for building up a more highly skilled Sacramento.

About the Author: Terry Daffin is an Executive Consultant within KAI Partners. He has worked in the IT industry for more than 30 years and has over 25 years of project management experience. As a public sector consultant in the health care industry, Mr. Daffin assisted in the development and implementation of Project Management Offices that include project management, service management, lean agile and traditional product development lifecycles, and governance processes. He has been an innovation advocate and evangelist for 15 years and has implemented innovative processes for projects that he has been engaged on since 2001. Mr. Daffin currently works as the Project Manager of the KAIP Academy, KAI Partners’ training division and is the Community Manager at KAI Partners’ new coworking space, The WorkShop – Sacramento, focused on connecting innovative start-ups and the public sector.

By Jason Hardi

Now more than ever, there is a buzz surrounding the “Internet of Things.” What is the “Internet of Things”? It’s a fast-evolving planetary infrastructure upgrade that is capturing and analyzing more data than ever.

More specifically, the Internet of Things, or “IoT,” involves an infrastructure move towards increasing machine-to-machine communication (called M2M) built on cloud computing, IPv6, 5G networks, and billions of mobile, virtual, and instantaneous connections to computer “smart devices.”

Just how many devices can IPv6 handle? According to Wikipedia: The length of an IPv6 address is 128bits, compared with 32 bits in IPv4. Therefore, the address space has 2128 or approximately 3.4×1038 addresses. Doing the math, this translates to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 potential devices, each with a unique IP address. Read aloud this number:

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456

We live in a word where “smart devices” are everywhere, and with the IoT, smart devices will become ever-present: Always there, always on, and always exchanging data 24/7/365.

While the foundation of the IoT focuses around “smart devices,” in reality, these are nothing more than sensors and reporting devices that report data to the cloud, which supports “Big Data” algorithms and research.

Cloud-based applications leverage the data and enable real-time meta-data analysis on everything from tracking where you are, your purchases, airplane data, and more—all of which comes from sensors enabled by the push to build the next generation 5G network. The cloud enables the sensors to capture data anytime, anywhere.

Real-time examples of how this emerging technology can save lives include adding “smart sensors” to bridges to measure real-time stress, weather-related issues such as ice, cracks, and movements that can predict failure. Such information has the tremendous real-time advantage of saving lives before failure ensues.

The IoT has allowed real-time software updates of the next generation of electric cars: The Telsa. Now, instead of taking your car in for service, it is automatically updated at night when you sleep—always evolving and always updating.

According to Fool.com, major corporations have been investing in IoT for years. Monsanto and other agriculture companies use IoT to make planting and harvesting food easier, faster, and more efficient by utilizing data from sensors on farm equipment and plants, satellite images, and weather tracking in order to increase food production.

General Electric (GE) is using IoT to help liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants decrease their downtime by pinpointing potential problem areas before they become major issues—a savings of up to $150 million a year, according to MIT Sloan Management Review (Sloan Review, Big Idea: Competing With Data & Analytics Research Highlight October 21, 2016).

With the IoT comes ubiquitous real-time monitoring that can improve our lives and help make the world a safer place. While the possibilities are endless, they do involve a degree of discernment over just how much monitoring should be allowed when looking at practical considerations involving privacy of our lives and the ethics related to big data tracking.

At KAI Partners, we specialized in these highly complex integrated projects, where cross-functional technologies provide leading solutions in the cloud, complex network architectures, and highly evolved leading edge architectures.

About the Author: Jason Hardi has been in the Information Technology field for over 25 years. Prior to that, he started his working life as a Marine Biologist. As a Marine Biologist, he saw the need to develop an early advanced statistical analysis program for biologists. The application, formerly called “Hyper Stats,” was subsequently marketed and sold at colleges across the country. Following this, Mr. Hardi entered the Information Technology field as a System Operator working in mainframe shops and has enjoyed advancing from entry-level positions up to Project Director and Advisor.