Big Data, Big Social, Big MDM

InformationWeek's Valley View, Episode 3, airing live this Thursday, Feb. 16, at 4 p.m. Pacific, will feature the usual (and unusual) variety of guests and topics--from startups in consumer tech and big data to Google+ and mobile device management. It will dance from product demos to executive interviews to (hopefully) heated debate, with some entertaining moments tossed in, including our gadget giveaways.

Valley View is free to watch, but you must register to be eligible for our prizes. We'll even have a giveaway for our in-studio audience (if you're in the area--UBM TechWeb headquarters in San Francisco--please stop by and enjoy the show and some refreshments).

We'll kick things off with Google's global marketing director for mobile and social, Rikard Steiber, and confine most of our conversation to Google+, which, despite its growth as yet another social network, has also drawn criticism and scrutiny. Among the beef is Google’s deliberate approach to things like denying Google+ pseudonyms, privacy issues related to how the company is correlating user activity across Google services, and the way the company has infused Google+ into Google searches to the exclusion of other social networks.

We'll see some exciting startups, including Chart.io, a company that aims to put business intelligence into the hands of the everyday user, pushing BI beyond the arcane and arduous work the company claims is normally required to extract meaning from data. We'll ask co-founder David Beyer for a demonstration of Chart.io.

Business technology pros have been analyzing data for dozens of years, but big data--vast amounts of quickly streaming, unstructured data--is still a relatively new phenomenon. And while a host of startups have set the pace, some of the big players--Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, among others--are jumping in with a bit of rhetoric and some products. Metamarkets is one of the startups, combining Hadoop, in-memory computing, and the cloud into its big data platform. CEO Michael Driscoll will talk about how the company will compete and show us how its product works.

The consumerization of IT still dominates many a technology conversations these days, and one of the main tools that IT is using to tame that beast is mobile device management (registration for the linked report required), the software that lets IT create and enforce policies for the various devices, the data on those devices, and the users.

Because this is such a white hot area, there are plenty of vendors in this market, and some of them approach the problem with completely different points of view (you can also download our mobile device management buyer's guide). Some products focus on protecting applications, some on protecting the entire device, some by creating virtual machines that segregate personal and work data and apps. Still others force all transactions and interaction through a modified software shell. In our MDM segment, we've selected Mobile Iron and Good Technology, two leaders in this sector, to go toe-to-toe in a debate about which approach is best. (We think it could get heated, but in that oh-so-friendly Silicon Valley sort of way.)

We'll also have Michael Skaff, CIO of the San Francisco Symphony. He'll talk about some of the trends CIOs are wrestling with, and we'll take a deeper dive into Skaff's particular challenges and projects.

Finally, we'll delve into video chat and video collaboration with a unique company called Tely Labs, which has created a product (telyHD) that extends Skype to a HDTV--a TV that doesn't have to have Internet connectivity built in. We've invited the company's CEO, Sreekanth Ravi, to demonstrate telyHD in action. (And then we'll give one away to a lucky online viewer.)

IT's jumping into cloud services with too much custom code and too little planning, our annual State of Cloud Computing Survey finds. The new Leap Of Cloud Faith issue of InformationWeek shows you what to be aware of when using the cloud. Also in this issue: Cloud success stories from Six Flags and Yelp, and how to write a SAN RFI. (Free registration required.)