As I prepare to go to the Data and Analytics conference in Chicago next week, I just realized how much I have been swimming in big data and analytics lately. There has been so much going that I think It makes sense to that highlight some activities from last week, upcoming activities next week and in early November.
    In case you haven't been keeping up with the frantic pace make sure you check out the news form last week:

Data Preparation Announcement

    Kevin Ott, General Manager of Cisco Data Virtualization and Connected Analytics Business Unit, introduced Cisco Data Preparation. This is a new big data and analytics offering for business analysts and IT that makes it easy for non-technical business analysts to gather, explore, cleanse, combine and enrich the data that fuels analytics and business decisions.
    Bob Eve, Data Virtualization BU, and Robert Novak, UCS Sales Engineering, also had a great discussion on new Cisco big data offerings at Strata + Hadoop World last week.

    Ok, so on to next week and things that I recommend that you don't miss:

Data and Analytics Keynote

    If you will be in Chicago next week, you are in luck because the line up for the keynote sessions is great. 

        -Mike Flannagan, VP and GM of Cisco's Data and Analytics Business Group
        -Jim Green, CTO of Cisco's Data and Analytics Business Group
        -Award-winning journalist and radio and TV personality Stephen J. Dubner author of Freakonomics. 

Infrastructure for Analytics breakout

    As you might have guessed I will be doing a little promotion for Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure at the show next week.
    Running Cisco Data Preparation on Cisco UCS's highly scalable infrastructure, removes limits on the amount of data that can be analyzed.  More data equals better insights and thus better business outcomes. Further, Cisco Data Preparation's machine learning algorithms, take advantage of Cisco UCS's high performance computation. This empowers business analysts to automate difficult work typically performed by data scientists and thus accelerate the analysis process. 
    If you are interested in learning more about Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure, come to my breakout session, "Infrastructure for Analytics," on Wednesday next week.

Virtual Conference

    Can't make it to Chicago next week? Start planning for Nov. 11th! We have an upcoming Business Analytics Virtual Tradeshow on Nov 11^th 8 a.m.-2 p.m. PT. Both Mike Flannagan and I will be presenting at keynote too! Come say hi!
    Follow me or your favorite Cisco peeps for real time updates: Cisco DC, Adrian den Hartog, Bill Shields, Bob Eve, Bruno Messina, Farid Jiandani, Gary Serda, Karthik Karupasamy, Manan Trivedi, Mike Flannagan, Raghu Nambiar, Renee Yao, Rex Backman, Robert Novak, Wendy Leopold