Last month (in September, 2016) Ashnik hosted its inaugural “Big Data Talk – Transformation Series” event in Singapore. The series has been designed to highlight key big data technologies that are shaping customer’s businesses. Though the interactive talks it aims to help enterprises walk away with actionable insights . The first in the series was brought in association with EnterpriseDB. Technology professionals from Singapore and Philippines who attended the event had fruitful interactions with Ashnik and EnterpriseDB’s experts.
On one hand, interactions with large enterprises in South East Asia has given Ashnik an insight into business challenges and on the other hand close association with key open source technology companies gives technical expertise. Combination of these puts Ashnik in a unique situation to apply these technologies to solve business challenges.
At the ‘Big Data Talk’ event  topic of discussions focussed around big data trends, implementation strategies and technologies. Senior business associates from various industries including banks, insurance, technology, etc. in and around Singapore attended the event.
Some of the key topics  that audience wanted to discuss were –  big data blueprints, how different databases like Postgres can help in the big data journey, overcoming data silos by means of data integration etc.
Since the attendees belonged to various industries  Ashnik strived to address their unique challenges and giving insights that could minimize the uncertainty around big data, as well as figure out ways to reduce cost and walk away with implementable Big Data strategies.
Some of the questions asked by attendees :
(i) What were the new areas of big data and how it was relevant to them.
(iv) How open source databases like Postgres could help in leveraging Big Data analytics in their environment.
(iii) What were the architectural level options for data lake/date warehouse implementation in the modern world.
(iv) Misconception related to Big Data – Big data is often associated with large volume of data. Attendees wanted to know is there is particular volume above which they had to think differently about the data.
(v) Robustness of enterprise open source products vis-à-vis proprietary licensed products.
(vi) Credibility and turnaround time (TAT) for achieving robust and secure enterprise open source solutions for big data platform.
(vi) Professionals with Oracle database background while discussing their business cases, had the following queries about EnterpriseDB Postgres:

• High Availability
• Support for third party authentication like Kerberos
• Protection against SQL injection
• Robustness of Postgres for usage in mission critical applications
• Support for Multi-core
• Parallelism
• Capability of Postgres to revive itself after data corruption
• Whether Postgres comes with any hosting solution of its own

Majority of the attendees were either users or were aware of Postgres and wanted to know how stable it was compared to proprietary licensed products. During the talk, EnterpriseDB spoke about their Postgres offerings, and elaborated on its features and robustness – that it matched any other enterprise class product. Ashnik successfully cleared some fog around the adoption of  enterprise open source products by highlighting some of the advantages over proprietary licensed products like:

• Reduction in capital expenditure – hence freeing up resources for other Big Data initiatives
• Faster TAT in fixing issues as users need not wait until the next release to receive patches
• Very strong and stable community which is constantly working towards optimizing the product
• Companies like EnterpriseDB’s accountability and thus making the product enterprise class

To summarize, this first event helped attendees walk away with a 360 degree view of big data, a very realistic picture of how Big Data could help them and most importantly, actionable insights to help them get started on their Big Data journey.
Check out the snapshot view of the tech-breakfast session, watch here.
Stay Tuned for the next in series!
Rekha Ramaswamy I Business Development Executive, Ashnik