Jeffrey Needham > Quotes

“Big data is the most disruptive force this industry has seen since the introduction of the relational database.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Big data is a type of supercomputing for commercial enterprises and governments that will make it possible to monitor a pandemic as it happens, anticipate where the next bank robbery will occur, optimize fast food supply chains, predict voter behavior on election day, and forecast the volatility of political uprisings while they are happening.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Although there is a lot of data involved, weather simulation is not considered “Big Data” because it is so computationally intense. Computing problems in science (including meteorology and engineering) are also known as high-performance computing (HPC) or scientific supercomputing.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Unfortunately, most organizations do not handle any change well, let alone rapid change. Chaos and disruption have been constants in this industry, yet were always accompanied by possibility and innovation.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Not all specialists will be comfortable or adept at cultivating breadth of knowledge, so the casting of tiger teams is extremely critical. Tiger teams fail when members are miscast or never allowed to forget which silo they really work for.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“The art and craft of platform engineering at internet scale demands three critical tenets: avoid complexity, prototype perpetually, and optimize everything.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Probability is an idea; outcome is an experience. Humans tend to perceive risk based on outcome rather than probability.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Complexity contributes to two major failure categories: software bugs and operator error.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

“Although the tenets of platform engineering apply to both enterprise- and global-scale computing, the difference is that at enterprise scale, the mantras are optional. At global scale, they’re mandatory. Platform engineering for big data demands three critical tenets: avoid complexity, prototype perpetually, and optimize everything.”
― Jeffrey Needham, Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything