Top 10 Highest Rated Companies Hiring For ‘Big Data’ – Report Card

- Scott Dobrowski, PR Specialist at Glassdoor (www.Glassdoor.com), says:

For the past year or more the term ‘Big Data’ has been spreading like wildfire, and as a result, companies are investing in Big Data and hiring all sorts of specialists to support it, including companies from HP to EMC to IBM, plus many more.

According to a recent McKinsey report the demand for ‘Big Data’ talent could soon outstrip supply by 50 to 60 percent, and companies in the U.S. will be looking to hire an additional 1.5 million managers and analysts with a sharp understanding of how big data can be applied. In addition, consider the fact that 90% of the world’s total data has been created just within the past two years, says IBM, and platforms are needed to keep up with the daily explosion of data created from mobile devices, online transactions, sensors and social networks.

So as the demand for employees who can support, manage and analyze ‘Big Data’ is on the rise and companies are looking to hire, which companies hiring for ‘Big Data’ rate highest among employees?
Glassdoor, a jobs and career community, turned to its vast database of active job listings and employee company reviews to find out which companies currently hiring for “big data” are rated highest by their own employees. The table below shows the top 10 highest rated companies hiring for ‘Big Data’ - the highest rated companies include: The MITRE Corporation (4.0), Google (3.9), Apple (3.8) and NetApp (3.8).

Top 10 Highest Rated Companies Hiring For ‘Big Data’:

Report based on companies with at least one active job listing featuring “Big Data” in its job title, and/or any keyword including “Big Data,” “Machine Learning,” “Data Scientist,” or “Hadoop” in its job description, as well as at least 100 approved company reviews. Report as of 10/26/11. The report does not include universities or recruitment agencies.

Interested in knowing what employees at the top 10 companies have to say about working there? Provided below is a sample of employees sounding off as of late on what’s working well and what needs to be improved:

“MITRE has a great work/life balance with respectable co-workers, high standard of education and great pay. If you work in the headquarters locations, there is ample opportunity to find something you’re interested in.” – MITRE Information Security Engineer (location n/a)

“MITRE tends to exhibit many older company ideals such as secretive promotions and compensation decisions, cliquish upper management tendencies and a ‘wait your turn’ mentality.” – MITRE Principal Information Systems Engineer (Colorado Springs, CO)

“Between on-site gyms, massage, a wide selection of health benefits, 401k and stock grants, competitive salary, and of course the free, gourmet meals, it’s one of the cushiest jobs in Silicon Valley.” – Google Software Engineer II (Mountain View, CA)

“Management can be clueless or absent at times. It can take a lot longer to get things done than you expect.” – Google Software Engineer III (New York, NY)

“The company is innovative, the corporate culture is amazing. You are truly setup for success when you start working there. I have found that management is open and ready to help.” – Apple Data Analyst (Elk Grove, CA)

Interested in a job or career with Big Data?

Big Data Jobs

Industry Trend: People Plus Data Are Aging and Living Longer

- Greg Schulz, Founder and Sr. Advisor of The Server and StorageIO (StorageIO) Group (www.storageio.com), says:

Lets face it, people and information are living longer and thus there are more of each along with a strong interdependency by both.

People living and data being retained longer should not be a surprise, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. There is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated, processed, moved and stored for longer periods of time not to mention that a data object is also getting larger.

By data objects getting larger, think about a digital photo taken on a typical camera ten years ago which whose resolution was lower and thus its file size would have been measured in kilo bytes (thousands). Today megapixel resolutions are common from cell phones, smart phones, PDAs and even larger with more robust digital and high definition (HD) still and video cameras. This means that a photo of the same object that resulted in a file of hundreds of Kbytes ten years ago would be measured in Megabytes today. With three dimensional (3D) cameras appearing along with higher resolution, you do not need to be a rocket scientist or industry pundit to figure out what that growth trend trajectory looks like.

However it is not just the size of the data that is getting larger, there are also more instances along with copies of those files, photos, videos and other objects being created, stored and retained. Similar to data, there are more people now than ten years ago and some of those have also grown larger, or at least around the waistline. This means that more people are creating and relying on larger amounts of information being available or accessible when and where needed. As people grow older, the amount of data that they generate will naturally increase as will the information that they consume and rely upon.

Where things get interesting is that looking back in history, that is more than ten or even a hundred years, the trend is that there are more people, they are living longer, and they are generating larger amounts of data that is taking on new value or meaning. Heck you can even go back from hundreds to thousands of years and see early forms of data archiving and storage with drawings on walls of caves or other venues. I Wonder if had the cost (and ease of use) to store and keep data had been lower back than would there have been more information saved? Or was it a case of being too difficult to use the then state of art data and information storage medium combined with limited capacities so they simply ran out of storage and retention mediums (e.g. walls and ceilings)?

Lets come back to the current for a moment which is another trend of data that in the past would have been kept offline or best case near line due to cost and limits or constraints are finding their way online either in public or private venues (or clouds if you prefer).

Thus the trend of expanding data life cycles with some types of data being kept online or readily accessible as its value is discovered.

Here is an easy test, think of something that you may have googled or searched for a year or two ago that either could not be found or was very difficult to find. Now take that same search or topic query and see if anything appears and if it does, how many instances of it appear. Now make a note to do the same test again in a year or even six months and compare the results.

Now back to the future however with an eye to the past and things get even more interesting in that some researchers are saying that in centuries to come, we should expect to see more people not only living into their hundreds, however even longer. This follows the trend of the average life expectancy of people continues to increase over decades and centuries.

What if people start to live hundreds of years or even longer, what about the information they will generate and rely upon and its later life cycle or span?

Here is a link to a post where a researcher sees that very far down the road, people could live to be a thousand years old which brings up the question, what about all the data they generate and rely upon during their lifetime.

Ok, now back to the 21st century and it is safe to say that there will be more data and information to process, move, store and keep for longer periods of time in a cost effective way. This means applying data footprint reduction (DFR) such as archiving, backup and data protection modernization, compression, consolidation where possible, dedupe and data management including deletion where applicable along with other techniques and technologies combined with best practices.

Will you out live your data, or will your data survive you?

These are among other things to ponder while you enjoy your summer (northern hemisphere) vacation sitting on a beach or pool side enjoying a cool beverage perhaps gazing at the passing clouds reflecting on all things great and small.

Industry Trends: Part 3 - Business Efficiencies, Regulation, and Security Risk Management

- Lisa Rhodes, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), says:

Over the last few weeks we have been focusing on the major trends facing the data center industry throughout 2011. We have discussed both the importance of data center business efficiencies and the effects of energy efficiency monitoring and regulation. The last area we’d like to take a look at is mitigating and managing security risks within the data center as it begins to play a larger role as an outsourced solution in the cloud environment.

Whether it be outsourcing infrastructure, integrating with public cloud technologies or improving the mobile capabilities of the workforce, the CIO has many options for technical advancement of the corporate IT strategy. But it is ultimately the management’s responsibility to adapt the infrastructure to take on these technologies without risking the established best practices for business critical topics. Security tops the list.

For public, private, or hybrid cloud and even mobile computing solutions, the security teams must develop network security solutions that will be able to connect existing users with the new resources and tools. Debate in the industry as to exactly how secure the cloud actually is continues with no clear consensus coming forward at this point in time. On the one side, IBM’s CTO of Cloud Computing Strategy, Harold Moss, recently said the cloud could actually be more secure than a traditional IT environment for reasons ranging from companies paying more attention to security requirements overall to the perception that providers are better able to provide a higher level of security. On the other hand, at the CeBIT conference this week, concerns about data privacy and security concerns were cited as two major reasons why cloud adoption has not taken off yet in Europe.

For outsourced data center solutions, the security team will need a provider that has a clear service level agreement (SLA) and open book accounting of security principles that it implements while delivering the outsourced services. This appears to be one area where most in the industry can agree. The need for an SLA that guarantees specific uptime, service response, bandwidth, and physical access protections is an essential item on the IT manager’s checklist as they are shopping for a data center solution in 2011.

There is also a different element of security that is gaining more prominence within the security discussion and that is the actual physical security of the data center itself. Vodafone recently experienced this as one of their more remote data center facilities was recently broken into and equipment stolen, resulting in a service loss for customers. CIOs don’t want service loss for customers for any reason, let alone one where facilities are broken into and equipment is stolen. No CIO wants to lay awake at night worrying about every remote location within their network that can be susceptible to any sort of physical destruction or tampering.

Without forward thinking on security solutions, many of the great ideas of 2011 will be completely inaccessible to the revenue generators. Once the location and the energy source are network ready and secured, the CIO can go about filling the data center and using it to best accomplish the company’s business mission.

* Verne Global is a regular contributor on Data Center Post

Industry Trends: Part 2 - Business Efficiencies, Regulation, and Security Risk Management

- Lisa Rhodes, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), says:

A couple weeks ago we started our three part series (see part 1) taking a deeper look at some of the trends we feel will shape the data center industry today and throughout 2011. In our last post we discussed the importance of improving business efficiencies within the data center so it seems only fitting that we turn the tables and focus on energy efficient monitoring and impending regulation.

Regulation isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, the data center industry is behind in regards to certification and regulation. In anticipation of federal legislation, self monitoring is on the increase. For example, the Green Grid recently released their concept for a CUE, a carbon usage effectiveness metric for the data center. With the PUE metric already widely accepted, the Green Grid continues to spearhead the movement to fight ‘dirty’ data centers. Now with a CUE metric, data centers will not only have to look at power efficiencies, but will also have to take carbon usage into consideration. Take Facebook, for instance. Facebook has been blasted by Greenpeace for using coal to generate electricity and is now caught up in a battle to “Unfriend Coal” and embrace clean energy. Facebook’s rationale has been that they have a very low PUE and because of it, boasted that they were one of the most efficient data centers in the world. Given the new CUE metric though, it seems like Facebook will be friending operators such as Yahoo! and Google who use renewable energy sources to power their data centers to get some ideas on cleaning up their power. The Green Grid also has a third metric in the works, WUE, that measures water use for cooling purposes. Provided that these metrics take off in a way similar to the acceptance of the PUE metric, we can expect that data centers will become the baseline for the regulatory efforts to achieve environmental friendliness.

Aside from Green Grid guidelines, regulation at federal and state levels is looming. While Britain has delayed its flagship Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) program by a year or two and the United States cannot seem to get a cap-and-trade law passed through Congress, don’t be fooled - carbon emissions, power generation, distribution and consumption are definitely on government check lists. The 2010 Uptime Institute Symposium highlighted this issue in numerous discussions on the affect of pending carbon legislation on data centers. Although symposium speakers stated that data centers are an unlikely target, the message that they will be impacted was clear. As large energy users, data centers are easy targets and with a high carbon footprint it’s not surprising they are on the radar screen. Yahoo alone stated that 75 percent of their carbon footprint was from data centers and shared that they had already taken steps to improve the numbers. A potential larger area focus in 2011 will likely be on the Clean Air Act and President Obama’s introduction of a Clean Energy Standard he referenced in his State of the Union address last month. Under the proposal, “By 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy source.” Should the Clean Energy Standard pass, data centers would be forced to use renewable power sources such as wind, solar, hydro, clean coal or natural gas. Data centers will need to start taking factors such as location seriously as they confront the issue and work to improve energy efficiency.

Carbon regulation is not the only game in town. Other data center areas including security, workplace safety and zoning are ripe for regulation as well and we’ll likely see the beginnings of those conversations in 2011. While efficiencies are improving in everything from chips to chillers, data centers are very much an energy consumer making them a prime target for energy and ultimately carbon regulations.

* Verne Global is a regular contributor on Data Center Post

Industry Trends: Part 1 - Business Efficiencies, Regulation, and Security Risk Management

- Lisa Rhodes, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), says:

A new year tends to bring about reflections on the previous twelve months as well as anticipation for what lies ahead in the coming year. In this three part series on Data Center POST, we are going to take a deeper look at some of the trends we feel will shape the data center industry today and throughout 2011: business efficiencies, regulation, and security risk management.

Usually when one thinks of efficiencies in the data center power consumption and energy usage are the first things that spring to mind. While we certainly agree that these elements are critical factors facing the data center industry moving forward, there are other types of efficiencies that CIOs are starting to think of in terms of their data center needs. Society’s need for more computing power continues to grow. A recent report from IDC is forecasting that server revenue this year will grow by $7 billion due to a growth in cloud computing, mobile computing and the amount of data being generated. Because of this, the role the data center plays within a company’s overall business strategy will begin to have even greater emphasis. CIOs are facing the critical task of ensuring this need is balanced by sound business decisions. Savings for the business, improving business flow and conserving capital expenditures are suddenly at the forefront of the conversation and CIOs will be tapping into the necessary resources in order to generate revenue, cut down on overhead costs and search for a balance of capital control and flexibility in design. The role of CIO is evolving and the traditional ‘boardroom CIO’ is being re-defined so that now CIOs not only have to breakeven but present new revenue streams from the data the company already possesses. Integrating data center operations with other business processes is going to be a huge focus of CIOs and they will strive to improve their operational models in order to generate greater revenue and cut back on resources.

Hand in hand with saving is conserving capital expenditures. CIOs nowadays are savvy about retaining capital for critical business interests but also don’t want to get behind the innovation curve. In search for a balance of capital control and flexibility in design many CIOs are choosing outsourced solutions and learning to take a modular approach. Those that overbuilt a few years ago aren’t around anymore to tell their tale so tapping into resources that deploy quickly without stranding important capital resources is crucial because it helps prevent inefficiencies and overbuild.

In order to meet financial goals, companies often look for opportunities to reduce manual labor and the data center industry is no different. The last point, but certainly not the last step, in the conversation surrounding business efficiency is the creation of a production platform for deployment of company applications. Cutting out a layer of hands on the assembly line and keeping headcount down has become easier in recent years with advances in virtualization and cloud deployments. CIOs have excellent tools available to them that can be used to further business missions and can consider options such as outsourcing to meet their needs and bring the computing resources right to the fingertips of business strategists and integrators.

Is improving business efficiencies really all it takes though? The answer is no - but, it is a step in the right direction. Data center management must be incorporated into overall business missions and topics such as cost saving and business flow must be made a priority before true efficiency can be achieved. For example, recently there has been an organizational shift in data center management. Those working in facilities are now reporting to the CIO because of their more thorough understanding of the data center energy costs as well as facility inefficiencies, which ultimately, can better help save companies money. Once CIOs have this sorted out, they can focus on managing security risks as well as regulation. Stay tuned for series part 2 and 3.