Big data has more disruptive potential than any information technology developed in the past 40 years. As author Jeffrey Needham points out in this revealing book, big data can provide unprecedented visibility into the operational efficiency of enterprises and agencies.

Disruptive Possibilities provides an historically-informed overview through a wide range of topics, from the evolution of commodity supercomputing and the simplicity of big data technology, to the ways conventional clouds differ from Hadoop analytics clouds. This relentlessly innovative form of computing will...