 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Friday, October 5th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Everyone is trying to figure out how to harness big data, including the government. Wednesday, the government rolled out a roadmap report for tackling big data projects. What kind of impact will this have on government projects going forward? Joining us now to discuss the government's big data strategy is Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly. Good morning, Jeff. Good morning. Thanks for having me. So tell us, what is the government's plan to tackle big data? Well, as you may recall, earlier this year, the government, the federal government announced $200 billion initiative, research initiative around big data. And that was a really good start. I mean, obviously you need the funds to support any kind of project of this scale. But kind of what we saw this week was the release of another more practically focused set of resources to help particular government agencies actually get started with big data. And that's key. That's really also the challenge we see in the business world, taking it from vision to reality. The report that was really stated, the impact of big data has the potential to be as profound as the development of the internet itself. So what do they mean by this statement? Well, if you think about all the data that we create as a society, and we're really not taking advantage of the vast majority of it at this point, and that's what big data is all about. You know, we create data every day on our cell phones with the social media applications we use, just all the machines running either in IT infrastructure, all the machines that are associated with, you know, ATMs, everything you use on a daily basis. Almost everything creates data of some kind. And so the idea that we can actually harness all that data, crunch it, process it, do some analysis to understand and find new ways to, in the government's case, serve the public more efficiently, secure our borders or prevent terrorism. There's so many options, so many possibilities out there. And we're just starting to really explore that. Can you tell us about some of the types of big data projects the government is working on? Sure. Well, you know, one of the more forward thinking organizations within the government when it comes to technology, not surprisingly, is NASA. So, you know, NASA has been engaged in big data projects, although perhaps not using that name, but they've been engaged in big data for a long time. So they're using big data for, among other things, for example, to try to understand climate change, crunch a lot of weather data from years past, that's data from, you know, historical data, that's data from real-time data coming in from centers throughout the world, temperature readings, things like that, crunch all that data to try to understand patterns, trends, identify areas where, you know, we can make a difference as a country, as a government, in terms of helping to kind of turn that trend around, the global warming. And so that's just one area where the government is kind of getting involved in big data. The key, I think, is to really expand beyond some of those organizations like NASA, which you would expect to have a pretty good handle on technology such as this, and extending that to more, to less technology, sophisticated organizations or agencies within the government such as education, transportation, and others. So of the projects that you mentioned, do you feel those are the ones of high priority for the government at this time, or are there others that could take precedence over those? Well, it's a good question. You know, it's hard to tell at this point, you know, what the federal government is putting there, is prioritizing in terms of big data projects. I mean, if it were me, I think some of the more crucial issues, of course, are education, improving our education system, finding new ways to, not just improve education, but track it and actually understand trends and to understand when we're improving, when we're not improving, and zero in on areas that we can take practical steps to actually improve the overall performance of students. Certainly, when it comes to the economy, you know, we're all trying to figure out ways. We watched the debate the other night between President Obama and Governor Romney. He talked about taxes and the national debt and the deficit. Arguing about, they're arguing about kind of math. Well, your math doesn't work. You do this many tax cuts, how are you going to solve the deficit? Well, that's really a math issue, and that's analytics. We can use analytics to find new ways to test what if scenarios like, well, what if we lower taxes in this bracket and raise them in that bracket, et cetera? What's really going to be the real impact of that? And that's where big data analytics could come into play. So it really has a real role, and it really could have real impact on everyone's day-to-day life when it comes to, you know, taxes in the economy. Can you give us any examples of big data success stories? Well, sure, you know, there's been quite a few in terms of, obviously, we all know about the big web companies that are using big data quite successfully. Anytime you log on to LinkedIn and it suggests, for instance, that you may know these people, that's all big data kind of crunching in the background. Excuse me, but we certainly know that a lot of financial services organizations are also using big data to track and identify fraudulent activity in real time so that they can actually take some action and when they identify that there is a fraudulent transaction occurring, they can actually stop it in real time rather than identifying that fraudulent activity a week later. It's too late, the bad guy has gone and he's got the money. So we're seeing that in the financial services space. We're seeing a little bit of development in the healthcare space and this is another area where the government certainly could use big data. But in the private sector, some of the private healthcare organizations are starting to use big data to help their physicians and clinicians better track patient outcomes, identify potentially new treatments, things of that nature. Although it's just kind of getting started there in healthcare. Certainly on the government side that could apply to the new healthcare initiative. I guess it's not that new anymore. Obamacare, it's called in terms of tracking and understanding how that is really impacting people on the ground. Coming up later this month, theCUBE will be covering two major conferences for big data. Strata Hadoop World from New York and IBM O IOD in Las Vegas. What kinds of things do you think we'll see coming out of these events? Well, there are different events, different focus. I mean, they're both related to big data certainly and IBM information on demand. That's a conference, obviously IBM is a mega vendor, one of the whales in the IT industry. So they're going to really focus on, I believe and I hope for their sake that they are focused on really delivering a cogent message around big data. The thing with IBM is they, as we all know, they've got a huge portfolio of analytics and data management technologies. The question I've always had about IBM is, well, how are you delivering that to customers in a practical way? So, you know, they have to deliver that message and I think that's what we're going to see them try to do at IBM information on demand. The next conference, Strata conference and Hadoop World, it's two conferences, it's kind of merged now. You know, that's a little bit more of, you might say, it's got a little bit more of the cool factor. That's where a lot of the cool kids in the IT industry will be. If you will, the hackers, the data scientists, things like that. So it's going to be a lot of, you're going to see a lot of big data startups, companies like Hadaft, companies like Squirrel and others who are really cutting, doing cutting edge work and big data, really pushing the envelope with new technologies. A lot of them related to the Hadoop ecosystem. So you're going to see a really lot of very interesting new technologies coming out of that show that we'll be highlighting. Well, Jeff, thanks for joining us this morning. Great to have you on. Thanks so much at any time. For information on news of the day and the latest breaking analysis, stay tuned on Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE.tv.