OREANDA-NEWS. August 05, 2016. A few weeks ago, we hosted a webinar on “The Need for an Agile Analytics Platform” with Cray’s SVP of Products, Ryan Waite, and featuring guest Mike Gualtieri, principal research analyst at Forrester Research. They looked at how analytics environments are becoming more dynamic and how a more agile platform can eliminate many challenges.

I found Mike’s characterization of “perishable” insights an important reminder of how quickly some decisions need to be made and the impact of unknowingly stale information.  However, even more interesting for me were the concepts around the analytics workflows themselves becoming more sophisticated and what that means for data scientists and their productivity. Here’s a three-minute snippet where Mike illustrates this point with predictive analytics and the need for fast iteration.

Ryan spoke about customers’ needs for platforms that must not only perform at scale but also adapt easily to new and even concurrent workloads. He noted, in fact, that it was direct customer engagements with data scientists and IT teams that drove us to create the Urika®-GX agile analytics platform. Here’s a five-minute summary where Ryan walks through the capabilities of this pre-integrated hardware and software platform that provide serious versatility with an open framework and sheer horsepower with supercomputing technologies.

We’ve also clipped several mini-segments from the longer webcast so you can browse and see what piques your interest. And even if you’re still trying to figure out the difference between Hadoop® and Spark™, there’s a great two-minute overview that will set things straight.