Financial services and healthcare companies could be the biggest beneficiaries of big data. Their real-time decision engines can be vastly improved by leveraging the latest advances in big data analytics. However, these companies are challenged in leveraging Open Software Systems (OSS). This presentation covers how, in collaboration with financial services and healthcare institutions, we built an OSS project to deliver a real-time decisioning engine for their respective applications. I will address two key issues. First, I will describe the strategy behind our hiring process to attract millennial big data developers and the results of this endeavor. Second, I will recount the collaboration effort that we had with our large clients and the various milestones we achieved during that process. I will explain the goals regarding big data analysis that our large clients presented to us and how we accomplished those goals. In particular, I will discuss how we leveraged open source to deliver a real-time decisioning software product called Fatafat to these institutions. An advantage of developing applications in Fatafat is that it is already integrated with Hadoop, Kafka for real-time data streaming, HBase and Cassandra for NoSQL data storage. I will talk about how these companies benefited from Fatafat and some of challenges we had in the design of this software. I will provide quantifiable improvements in key metrics driven by Fatafat and interesting, unsolved problems/challenges that need to be addressed for faster and wider adoption of OSS by these companies.

No abstract available.