This week featured the Strata event, a gathering that’s dedicated to everything big data. It’s an event that has been regularly attended by SiliconANGLE and Wikibon throughout the years.  This particular industry has historically been, and still is, a very rapidly evolving one, and Strata provides a rather comprehensive means of tracking the growth of big data from the perspective of several industry insiders.

This year has been no exception. Day 1 and 2 focused mainly on areas such as data mining and efficiency, specifically how the internet and social media tie into it all. These two segments, one within another, produce a tremendous amount of data that empowers companies to draw more insight from customer behavior while at the same time making a negative impact on the common. The latter topic has been addressed by MCIC’s Virginia Carlson in an interview at theCube.

Day 3 has been just as engaging.  After the intro we heard Jonathan Gosier discuss the need to democratize big data tools in order to boost innovation, and add some of the elements that are missing from current offerings. Among these is an emphasis on collaboration, one that is necessary in complex environments such as Hadoop deployments, and an overall simplification of the whole process. This can be achieved via visualization and other forms of automation.

After that Greenplum took the stage, followed by a speech from an MIT student and Pete Warden of Jetpac. One of the other keynotes focused on what is expected to be the next step in big data analytics adoption: the creation of more and more applications that leverage this technology to offer a better level of service. Gary Lang of MarkLogic talked this over extensively as well.