IBM Datapalooza, Oracle Updates BI Platform: Big Data Roundup

6 Ways Big Data Is Driving Personalized Medicine Revolution

Big data is expected to make a big impact in healthcare and personalized medicine. But where are the real projects in this field and what progress is being made?

This week, InformationWeek took a deeper look at big data projects for personalized medicine. Plus, we have news on Google open sourcing its machine learning library, TensorFlow. We've also got news from Informatica, IBM, Oracle, and more.

Let's start with our collection of big data personalized medicine projects. This week, InformationWeek pulled together some of the top personalized medicine projects utilizing big data. IT and big data are helping drug trials search for better treatments for conditions from arthritis to cancer. Take a look at these ground-breaking projects here.

Google this week open sourced its machine-learning library, TensorFlow under the Apache 2.0 license. The company said that this software can turn machine-learning algorithms that have been written as graphs of symbolic impressions into efficient low-level code. The software is not tied to Google infrastructure and can be run on other systems, too. See the full story here.

Informatica used a virtual event this week to roll out its Big Data Management platform, designed to help users easily connect all front-end analytics software to all types of back-end data infrastructure. The company said the platform combines integration, governance, and security in a single package to make it easy for organizations to utilize the data they have. Take a look at the full story here.

Meanwhile, IBM continued on a mission it declared in June to create a million new data scientists. The company added about 230 during its Datapalooza educational event this week in San Francisco, where prospective data scientists got to work with IBM's newly launched Data Science Workbench and Bluemix cloud services to build their first analytics apps. IBM will take its show on the road next year to a dozen cities around the world, including Berlin, Prague, and Tokyo. Read the full story here.

In addition to personalized medicine, the topic of the Internet of Things (IoT) comes to mind when big data is discussed. IT research firm Gartner this week released a forecast of the IoT market that said 6.4 billion connected objects, including consumer devices, will be in use by 2016 -- a 30% rise from this year. Where will that figure be by 2020? Gartner said we will hit 20.8 billion by then. Overall, this IoT market will support total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22% from this year. Get the full story and forecast here.

Back in enterprise IT land, many CIOs are grappling with the big issue of how to make their backend systems and customer-facing systems talk to each other with zero latency, and how to deploy them in an agile way. Well, American Express Global Business Travel had the funding and gumption to say, "to heck with the update, let's rip it all out and start with cloud-based systems!" Here's the story of how the company did it, what it chose, and how long it took.

Everyone knows that visualization is one of the keys to making business intelligence meaningful to users. With that in mind, this week Oracle announced general availability of its Oracle Business Intelligence 12c, which includes a new visual analysis component for data. Oracle said that the update allows people across an entire organization to leverage a single integrated platform for self-service and visual data discovery. More on Oracle's new release is here.

[Find out what Intel is doing with Internet of Things. Read Intel Primes The Internet Of Things Pump.]

Finally, IDC this week released a new big data forecast. The company is forecasting a compound annual growth rate for the market of 23% over the 2014 to 2019 forecast period, with annual spend reaching $48.6 billion in 2019.

The market analyst firm said it expects all three big data submarkets -- infrastructure, software, and services -- to grow over the next five years. Infrastructure will grow at a 21.75% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). Software, including analytics, information management, and applications software, will grow at a CAGR of 26.2%. Services, including professional support and support services for infrastructure and software will grow at a CAGR of 22.7%.

As big data matures, IDC expects its share of the larger Business Analytics market to increase. However, the year-over-year growth within the big data market is forecast to gradually slow, IDC said, caused by increased price pressures for infrastructure and higher rates of commercialization of open source software. The availability and skill level of big data IT and analytics talent will also have a direct impact on the market, IDC said. Here's a full version of the IDC statement about the market forecast.