How the President Used the Cloud to Beat Romney (Part 2)

Gathering Clouds: Obviously, the groundswell during the last campaign was a very palpable cultural moment, and a lot of the technologies that you were using this time around weren’t as widely available last time. How did these technologies change? What was ultimately the benefit for you guys? >>>

How the President Used the Cloud to Beat Romney (Part 1)

Cloud Player: Interview with Obama for America’s Engineering Director, Dylan Richard: How the President Used the Cloud to Beat Romney, by Gathering Clouds

[Editor’s note: We hope you enjoy this special guest interview from Gathering Clouds.]

In honor of President Obama’s second inauguration, we had the great pleasure to sit down for an extended conversation with Dylan Richard, Director of Engineering at Obama for America. Our conversation explored:

• How the Obama campaign brought together such a talented staff 
• What technologies created the foundation for the campaign’s success 
• How Amazon Web Services suited the requirements of the Obama tech organization
• How the Romney campaign chose a different IT path to a different end result

Dylan Richard, Director of Engineering at Obama for America

Gathering Clouds: What are your feelings on how the presidential election went? What was the experience like?

Dylan Richard: The campaign was the most amazing experience that I could possibly imagine. There was just a staggering amount of work. I was there for 18 months and towards the end, it was 16- to 20-hour days, seven days a week for the final couple of months. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: InSync, Kolkata, India

In 2006, 1M/1M premium member InSync was established as an IT company to provide software solutions to Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) from their location in Kolkata. Over the next three years, InSync would acquire more than 500 domestic customers, and make an important discovery. They noted that at a certain volume, it was impossible for customers to manage their e-commerce businesses without an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Leveraging this knowledge, InSync shifted focus from services to product and released their flagship integration solution, SBOeConnect. Today, the company specializes in solutions that complement enterprise solution products, as well as business intelligence services, including reporting and data warehousing. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Franz Aman, Chief Marketing Officer, Silicon Graphics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Based on where you sit and what you look at on a regular basis, what are some of the open problems from your point of view?

Franz Aman: In the big data space in particular, everyone has jumped on the analysis and understanding of big data, which is entirely understandable. But I think the next trend we are going to see and the next big wave is going to be all about applications and transactions on big data. I think it is an under-served space and opportunity right now. Before we know it, we are going to see the venture capitalists not so much in just the analysis [of] technology [used in] managing big data, but more about transacting on that data and having the same fidelity in transactions that you have with relational databases. Then what is required to bring big data applications to a mobile environment as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Franz Aman, Chief Marketing Officer, Silicon Graphics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, you are avoiding that problem by blowing out the main memory available and then doing the in-memory computing on top of that?

Franz Aman: Correct. Then it is native. It is just available, and your application will just run. We recently did a project with a researcher from the University of Illinois about a Twitter analysis. That was one of these big brain systems where we needed one big, continuous memory space to do some of the analysis in real-time at the rate at which we did it. That is the only way you can do something like that. A lot of times I talk with people about 64 terabytes of space, and they think I have the sizes wrong. They ask if I meant gigabytes and not terabytes, or they think it is disk space and not main memory, but it actually is main memory. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Franz Aman, Chief Marketing Officer, Silicon Graphics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about in-memory databases and said you were using Oracle’s in-memory database technology. Could you talk a bit about trends in in-memory databases, because it looks like SAP is setting its entire company on HANA? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Franz Aman, Chief Marketing Officer, Silicon Graphics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to talk in more detail about some of the customers and problems you discussed. You can pick whichever your favorites are. Let’s do three or four use cases. I would like to dive into the depths of what problems you are solving and how you are solving them. What role does SGI play in terms of what you need in order to solve those problems? What does a big data solution look like in various scenarios? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Franz Aman, Chief Marketing Officer, Silicon Graphics (Part 1)

Franz Aman is the chief marketing officer of SGI (Silicon Graphics), a leader in technical computing. Franz counts more than 20 years of leadership and innovation in global product marketing, brand strategy, and communications. In this interview, he talks about the development of SGI over the past two decades and the opportunities and possibilities that lie in big data in the coming years, especially with regards to real-time data processing.

Sramana Mitra: Franz, let’s start with an introduction to SGI. I have known the company for at least 20 years. We even used SGI machines when I was at university at MIT. We were designing chips using gap tools that were used in SGI or some workstations. Today SGI looks like a very different company. What would you like the world to see when it looks at SGI today? >>>