Interview with John Mertic, Director, The Linux Foundation, Speaker at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference August 30 - Sep 1 Posted on : Aug 02 - 2016

We feature speakers at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference Aug 30 - Sep 1 2016 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to John Mertic, Director, The Linux Foundation.

Interview with John Mertic

Tell us about yourself and your background.
I lead the ODPi initiative on behalf of the Linux Foundation, focusing on strategy, community building, membership, and business development. My entire career has been spent in open source, from my early days as a contributor to the PHP project, community manager and partnership leader at SugarCRM, kicking off the partner program at Bitnami, and leadership roles in OW2 and OpenSocial.

What have you been working on recently?
My focus has been obtaining app vendors, solution providers, and end user feedback on the opportunities and challenges they see with Apache Hadoop and Big Data technologies in general. Our goal here at ODPi is to simplify and standardize the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, with the key continent of downstream consumers of these technologies. My time is spent evangelizing, listening, and helping connect the community members together to strengthen the ecosystem in a vendor-neutral and open source way.

What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your Apache Hadoop Is Retro: Unlocking Business Value talk?
That growth in Big Data, and in particular the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, is dependent on building a standard base for innovation to flourish from. History has shown that enterprises are bearish to invest in areas without standards, which has kept Apache Hadoop adoption in the Fortune 500 around 30% - that is a ridiculously low number for such a game changing technology. ODPi is a community that is built to address this problem, using the principles of open source as a guide.

What trends you see in upcoming 6 months?
Increased innovation which will drive the need for standards. So much is coming from the firehose, and enterprises will begin to recognize that their IT infrastructure will help them engage better with their customers in a differentiated way from their competition. Those focusing on full stack, closed ecosystem solutions will find themselves behind the curve.

 Any closing remarks?
As someone fairly new to the Big Data world, but who has spent quality time with some of its major players, I’m really excited by the speaker lineup and the organizations represented. In such a quickly evolving space, it will be facilitating to see how transformational these technologies are and what use cases out there are being focused on next.