| | September 20178CIOReview"Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale."­ Mark AndreesenIn 2011 Marc Andreesen famously made the declaration that "software is eating the world." Five years later software's victory is complete. The world now runs on software and every competitive company, at its core, is a software company.Ironically, the software revolution is only just beginning. The next wave of the internet's digital transformation is already upon us and it is being fueled by data, lots and lots of data. Digital data, which underlies the next generation of software, has three defining characteristics. Digital data is pervasive, it is connected, and it is cognitive.The pervasiveness of digital data is being driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), which means that everything in the physical world potentially transmits and receives data. The connectedness of digital data is being enabled by cloud computing, a digital fabric which connects disparate data, either by source or structure, and also provides the computational power to deliver new services at global scale. The cognitive nature of digital data is emerging from AI-powered software, whereby new techniques in statistical science, machine learning, and deep learning allows us to create intelligent software.What is intelligent software? Traditional software applications perform predefined tasks which are explicitly programmed by human programmers. Intelligent software can go beyond the pre-defined tasks by sensing, adapting, and learning automatically based on new data. A powerful example is the cognitive software underlying IBM's Watson. Imagine Watson offers an initial medical diagnosis based on machine learning. But then it goes further by carrying out a dialog with the attending physician to confirm the diagnosis and, going even further, to consider various treatment options. The most exciting direction of intelligent software is, therefore, augmented intelligence where machines augment but not replace the intelligence of humans.In the Valley of the Geeks (not to be confused with Silicon Valley) open source magicians are laying place a number of the foundational innovations for enabling the next generation of intelligent software. The first software revolution was made possible by open source technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP, TCP/IP, and Ethernet. Industry creatively co-opted these open source innovations and made it the basis of the first wave of software innovation. A similar dynamic is at play today. Open source, which includes the academic research community, is spawning new technologies and methodologies which are now beginning to be at the data-driven intelligent software.Hadley Wickham and Fernando Perez are two superheroes leading the open source charge in analytics and data science. Wickham, originally from New Zealand, comes from the world of statistics. He did a stint as a professor at Rice University and is now chief scientist at Revolution R. Fernando Perez, originally from Colombia, comes from the world of physics with expertise By Alfred Essa, VP, Analytics and R&D, McGraw-Hill EducationWill Data Eat the World? Yes, With Some Help from Open SourceIn My OpinionAlfred Essa
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