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I’m here at Newbury races and in the horse racing community the end of March is a time of both reflection and anticipation.

The jumping community reflects on how their horses performed at the Cheltenham festival in March. Years of work cumulating in one week of championship racing in the Cotswold countryside. Others in the community are anticipating the Aintree festival where the most famous of races, The Grand National, is to be run in a few weeks.

And anticipation is the watchword in the flat racing community. With the first of the five classic races only six weeks away the new season is just under way and trainers and connections wait to see if their two year olds have trained on into potential classic winning three year olds. Win one of these classics and the value of the horse in the breeding and bloodstock industry jumps exponentially. Others wait to see if their significant investments in yearly purchases last year will make the grade as two years old. 

Horse racing and betting is a heavily stats driven business. From analyzing racing form to matching bloodlines the key is to spot the piece of information that the bookmaker or other breeder have missed and make an investment on that knowledge.

Just as the jump trainers review their year a highlight so far has been the massively successful Data Science event Greenplum held in February. Several hundred interested parties listening to leading thinkers of the day Marcus Du Sautoy and Peter Hinssen.

However, just like the flat trainers it is the promise of what is to come and the anticipation of some of the potential Greenplum has been developing that excites me most.

In particularly we have some fantastic two year olds in the stable. This month we released Chorus V2.0 our productivity software.

The first solution of its kind, Greenplum Chorus provides an analytic productivity platform that enables the team to search, explore, visualize, and import data from anywhere in the organization. It provides rich social network features that revolve around datasets, insights, methods, and workflows, allowing data analysts, data scientists, IT staff, DBAs, executives, and other stakeholders to participate and collaborate on Big Data. Customers deploy Chorus to create a self-service agile analytic infrastructure; teams can create workspaces on-the-fly with self-service provisioning, and then instantly start creating and sharing insights.

Here I think we’ve developed that thoroughbred piece of software that will dominate the analytics productivity market for years to come. Just like the great sire Saddlers Wells who dominated the bloodstock industry. One reason for this is the bold announcement that the software will be open source. Just like a champion sire whose bloodline is found throughout the form books of racing history by open sourcing this software EMC Greenplum is truly creating a platform from which to develop your big data applications. The Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) is the Open, Agile and Collaborative platform of the future.  

It seems that it was not only me that anticipates Chorus to be a classic winner. Some of the immediate analyst reaction included

“Greenplum clearly understands data scientists and has crafted a social application just for them. This is the emerging face of the social enterprise. Ultimately, it is about using social tools to accomplish our jobs better–and not social for social’s sake.”

“Just as important, we expect a growing range of next-generation Big Data development tools to plug into extensible open-source platforms geared to boosting the collective productivity of teams of data scientists and subject-matter experts. It’s with this last trend in mind that we laud EMC Greenplum’s recent announcement that it is open-sourcing its new Chorus “social” framework for Big Data development.”

With Greenplum’s Unified Analytics Platform bringing together our stable’s thoroughbreds including not only Chorus but also the industry-leading massively parallel processing (MPP) database (Greenplum DB) and our enterprise Hadoop offering, Greenplum HD, the industry is anticipating a massive transformation to UAP.

Just as the bloodstock industry has a chorus of Anticipation I have my own Anticipation of Chorus

If you’re interested in learning about building an analytics business for the future and learning about analytics in general then please follow my blog journey throughout 2012

Post By Big Daddy of Big Data (9 Posts)

Chris is a keen horseman who travels to County Meath in Ireland to join Cross Country Chases. That is up to 300 horses and riders travelling at speed over ditches ("drains" in Ireland) and hedges across the countryside for 10 miles. He developed his taste for chasing while he was EMC's Ireland Country Manager. So taking on exciting challenges is part of his make up so when EMC asked if he would he lead the UKI Greenplum business he "jumped" at the opportunity. He seemed perfectly suited for the role which combines his experience of business transformation, Artificial Intelligence and 11 years EMC tenure. In previous roles he has lead EMC's consulting organization and also the overall UK&I Services business. Chris has a First Class degree in Computing and Information Technology specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. His career began as a database designer and he was awarded Chartered Engineer and Chartered Information Systems Practitioner four years later by the BCS and Engineering Council.

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