Kyle Rice received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from American University, a B.S. in Physics from American University, and an M.S. in Computer Science from George Mason University.
Today, Rice is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SAIC’s Intelligence Systems Business Unit (ISBU), worth $1.2 billion. He has firsthand experience deploying the SOA baseline of the Global Information Grid, which is the first combat zone leveraged SOA in the DoD, supporting the Multi National Corps-Iraq. At SAIC, he is responsible for the establishment and oversight of the company’s technical direction.
Rice spoke with WashingtonExec about his role at SAIC, more about his work deploying the SOA baseline, why the fuss over big data, how it’s connected to cloud computing and mobility, implementing big data analytics solutions, and why his favorite spot is the Einstein Memorial.
WashingtonExec: How would you describe your role at SAIC in providing oversight for technical direction?
Kyle Rice: I’ve always been a software guy, primarily in the DOD and IC space. For most of my career I’ve generally focused on the manipulation and the visualization of data so the recent rise in big data is something that is near and dear to me. As far as SAIC is concerned, this is actually my second go around– I was here back in the ‘90s and then went to a small company, McDonald Bradley, for the intervening decade.
I’m now the CTO of our Intelligence Systems business unit. We are the part of SAIC that builds capabilities, primarily IT capabilities, for the intelligence community in the national security space. In that role I run our Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program so we make investments to keep the company in front of where our customers are heading. As you might imagine we’ve been investing heavily in big data solutions for a number of years and it’s certainly something that has paid off for us.
WashingtonExec: I understand that you have firsthand experience in deploying the SOA baseline of the global information grid. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Kyle Rice: That was really a fun program. That was back in 2003 when Iraq was first spinning up and OSD came to us and wanted us to build a data infrastructure to help support the war. We were dealing with – from a technology side – web services, SOA, distributed multi-level security, a lot of high volume data access from a variety of distributed sources, geo-tagging, and those sorts of things. Nowadays that list is pretty standard; they are key parts of what we are calling cloud and big data now, but back then it was pretty cutting edge stuff.
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“Our successes in that area set a lot of the foundation for some of the mind share and the work we’ve done around big data.”
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WashingtonExec: The concept of big data has sort of been around for a long time. Why do you think it has exploded now?
Kyle Rice: I think there are really two aspects to this. The first is a technology aspect and that’s just driven by the growth of sensors that are everywhere. They capture an increasingly high volume of data. In the DOD space, which is where we focus a lot of our efforts, we continue to see more and more advanced sensors going overseas. A single modern airborne sensor can capture more than 250 terabytes of data per hour, and that’s dwarfed by the production of data in more traditional domains. The ‘Internet of Things’ is upon us – mobile devices, RFID, bar codes – and this is turning the internet itself effectively into a big sensor. If you combine that sensor revolution with a parallel technology revolution in storage and processing, it becomes feasible to finally do something with that data. This was the driver behind our Critical Insight™ big data solution.
I would say the other aspect, kind of a non-technology aspect, is that cloud hype has been building for a number of years and if you look at the hype curve it peaked around 2011. Cloud is very effective but it is just an infrastructure. Big data builds on top of that cloud to solve a problem.
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“Big data is a logical extension of that infrastructure and I think that’s what’s got a lot of things coming together at the right time.”
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WashingtonExec: How are big data, cloud computing and mobility connected?
Kyle Rice: I look at big data, cloud computing and mobility as these stacks of three blocks of decreasing size as you go up. The bottom block would be cloud computing, the infrastructure used to do a wide variety of things; big data as the second block, smaller than the cloud; and mobility at the top because it is the smallest of all and it provides a great way to expose and distribute the results of the big data processing. Mobile is certainly not the only way to do this, but it’s really kind of the way we are heading.
WashingtonExec: What trends have you noticed regarding how big data is stored or shared with others?
Kyle Rice: I think the big trend is the move toward public providers, and this is really just driven by economics. Amazon can sell you storage at what works out to be 10% of the cost of an on-premise solution. And the security of the public providers is getting better all the time. So it takes a specialized case to warrant the price premium of doing things in-house.
Our particular market is filled with specialized customers who need to pay the premium to not outsource things to a public provider. For users who need to do things internally, even within the IC, we are moving towards a consolidated secure architecture, the idea is to get some of the size advantages that you can in a public cloud space, but at a much smaller scale and at a much higher level of security.
WashingtonExec: What do you think might be big data’s biggest misconception?
Kyle Rice: I think the biggest misconception around big data is that Hadoop is the be-all and end-all solution. It is a great technology and is certainly a part of the big data solution but at the end of the day, big data is not just an infrastructure problem: it’s really a data science problem. It takes a more holistic approach to solve that big data issue.
WashingtonExec: Do you have a favorite or a go-to app?
Kyle Rice: For me it’s the Sonos music controller. I’m a bit of a nut job when it comes to wiring up my house so this is really my key application. It lets me connect all my music sources with all my speakers in arbitrary combinations using whatever mobile device I have handy. I used this one app as justification to my wife to buy an early iPad, so it’s served me well.
WashingtonExec: When implementing big data analytics solutions, what do you find is the biggest hurdle: corporate culture push-back or the finding the most advanced technology?
Kyle Rice: I think that really depends on the community. There is certainly within our customer set an ongoing culture of ‘Hey, it’s my data.’ That is definitely getting broken down and DNI folks are doing a great job of incentivizing and encouraging other agencies to share and that’s a very positive and very healthy trend. In previous years it wasn’t even all that relevant to have those sorts of discussions because the technology didn’t really support that large scale sharing but the technology aspect is really enabling that sharing. It’s a little bit of both which is kind of wishy-washy, but the reality.
WashingtonExec: Have you seen people warming up to this idea in the Intelligence Community?
Kyle Rice: Certainly within the Intelligence Community; it used to be called the different things but now it is called the IC-ITE Enterprise. There have actually been a number of articles in the open press about how the Intelligence Community is moving towards the common cloud environment and common data sharing environment.
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“That’s tremendously healthy from a cost standpoint but also from a mission performance standpoint.”
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WashingtonExec: Do you have a favorite spot in our Greater Washington DC area that you like to frequent; a restaurant, park or museum?
Kyle Rice: I have always been very fond of the Einstein Memorial downtown. Back when I was in college, we would wander down to the mall pretty regularly and that’s always been a great spot to sit, watch the passersby, and think about where things are heading.
