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July 6, 2012

This Week’s Big Data Big Five

Datanami Staff

It’s been a quieter week than usual on the U.S. technology news front with the holiday week winding down, but a few companies made big waves, including TIBCO, which announced hefty revenue increases; Cloudera, with its co-founder and chief scientist moving into medicine; as well as movements on the DATA Act and growth in the Latin American market.

Without further delay, let’s start with a small but relevant piece of news from event-processing and real-time analytics company, TIBCO, which shared its positive news with the world in a statement about growing demand and use of complex event processing platforms.

Big Data at Heart of TIBCO Revenue Boom

This week software giant, TIBCO, announced results for its second fiscal quarter with total revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2012 at $247.4 million and net income of $26.5 million. This compares to total revenue of $216.4 million and net income of $21.0 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, as reported for the second quarter of fiscal 2011. 

According to Vivek Ranadivé, TIBCO’s chairman and CEO. “A growing list of customers across industries and geographies are harnessing big data and becoming event-driven through the use of our infrastructure software platform — whether for new demand generation, improved loyalty program returns, increased operational efficiencies, or superior risk management.

 Ranadivé  says that the company’s focus on high-speed analytics will continue, noting that “In up markets and down, these remain priority initiatives that continue to create opportunities for TIBCO.”

Next — Cloudera Cofounder Teams with Mount Sinai School of Medicine >>


Cloudera Cofounder Teams with Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Cloudera Cofounder and Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher made news this week with the announcement that he will be leading a revolutionary project with Mount Sinai School of Medicine to apply his big data background to address critical problems in predicting and understanding the process and treatment of disease.

We are at the cutting edge of disease prevention and treatment, and the work that we will do together will reshape the landscape of our field,” said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, The Mount Sinai Medical Center. “Mount Sinai is thrilled to join minds with Cloudera.”

As a founder of Cloudera, Hammerbacher says he fully appreciates the technology’s potential for solving previously intractable or even un-askable questions in medicine. In concert with Mount Sinai’s clinical and academic community, he will help to develop solutions designed to enable performance scalable data analysis and multi-scale measurements in areas such as genotype, gene expression and organ health for medical research and discovery. The new software will also provide real-time feedback and guidance for treatment to improve patient outcomes.

“We can improve healthcare delivery and treatment through new technology and acquired knowledge,” said Eric Schadt, PhD, director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai. “I am delighted that Jeff will be collaborating with the Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology and look forward to working together to dramatically change how we think about medical analysis and reporting.”

Hammerbacher says he is enthusiastic about the implications of big data in medicine and, with support of Cloudera’s Data Science team, will be dedicating a portion of his time to this collaboration. Areas of research include analysis of human and bacterial genomes, study of the metabolic pathways of normal and disease states in the organism, structure and function of molecules used in treatment of disease, and more.

“I’m excited to work closely with one of the world’s best research and teaching hospitals, as we expand what it means to be in the Data Science field,” Hammerbacher said. “The value of Hadoop lies not in the technology itself, but in the real world problems it can solve.” 

Next — Teradata Champions DATA Act >>


Teradata Champions DATA Act

On July 10 Teradata will make its case for the positive rewards that integrated, detailed data visibility can bring to decision makers in government agencies and U.S. citizens through the DATA Act (H.R. 2146). 

The DATA Act passed in the House of Representatives unanimously on April 25th and next is headed for a Senate vote. It will transform the way the U.S. government’s spending information is reported, analyzed, and used, establishing a new entity, the Federal Accountability and Transparency Commission (FAST Commission). The commission will have the authority to set data standards for all federal spending, including both external grants and contracts and internal expenditures.

Teradata says itwill continue its support for the DATA Act with a presentation by Bill Franks, its Chief Analytics Officer for Global Alliances and the author of a new book on data analytics.  Franks will showcase the valuable insights made possible with integrated data and analytics on a large, national scale. The technologies and insights are not futuristic but are a reality in government organizations today whose successful projects have proven to be virtually self-funding.

The company says it will call attention to the benefits of integrated data analytics for the social and economic good by urging the Senate to pass H.R. 2146 and adopt an innovative process already successful among multiple state revenue agencies – which have collectively recovered $1.8 billion in unpaid taxes owed their respective state governments.

Teradata and other technology firms will make presentations to government agency staff members, the Recovery Board, congressional committees and various media outlets on July 10th, 2012, at 10 a.m. at Microsoft’s Innovation and Policy Center, 901 K St NW, 11th floor, Washington D.C. The event, known as DATA Act Demo Day, is sponsored by The Data Transparency Coalition, the only group unifying the technology industry in support of federal data reform. Technology can do a great deal of good, economically and socially, say participants and supporters of DATA Act Demo Day activities.

According to Tim Day, vice president of Public Affairs for Teradata. “The DATA Act will accelerate the government’s ability to meet this important milestone through data management at the federal level – while providing important benefits to American citizens who desire more government transparency and a more judicious use of public funds.” 

Next — Latin America Growing Hotbed for Analytics >>


Latin America Growing Hotbed for Analytics

BI platform vendor, Jaspersoft, says it is seeing tremendous growth and momentum in the Latin American countries.  The company claims it has grown its revenues by more than three times in the region over the past two years, making Latin America one of the fastest-growing markets for the company. 

While most of the growth recently has been from companies in Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico, the vendor says it is seeing an increased customer set from Argentina and Central America and Caribbean.  Customers have come from all kinds of industries, but Jaspersoft has seen exceptional interest from the banking, pharmaceutical and telecommunications sectors.  Jaspersoft customers in Latin American include companies including Amarey Medical, Banco Santander de Mexico S.A de C.V. Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia, the parent company of Juan Valdez coffee, Psicofarma S.A. de C.V. and telco giant, Telefonica.

According to Gartner, a leading analyst research firm, Latin America is the fastest growing region in the world for business intelligence software.  In 2011, Gartner cited the region’s market for business intelligence platforms was $287M, demonstrating a 35% growth over 2010. 

Jaspersoft says it is working with some of the top implementation partners in Latin American to assist with serving its customers there.  Jaspersoft’s partners include IT Nova in Columbia and IT Management in Chile.

Next — Lunexa Boosts Kelley Blue Book >>


Lunexa Boosts Kelley Blue Book

Kelley Blue Book, a large provider of new and used car information that got its start in 1926, announced that they are tapping Lunexa, a technology consulting firm dedicated to helping firms harness their data assets, for the deployment of data management capabilities. 

Lunexa helps companies integrate data assets for a single view and in the case, was implemented to add a significant volume of historical data and create ongoing daily data feeds into Kelley Blue Book’s enterprise data warehouse. With this addition, Kelley Blue Book says they can now analyze large data sets with complex relationships and create far more sophisticated reports than ever before. The auto reporting company also claims enhanced reporting capability, which allows KBB to improve its analytics intelligence and develop new insights. 

“This implementation allows us to advance toward our goal of achieving an integrated view of disparate data assets across the enterprise,” said Dan Ingle, vice president of valuation at Kelley Blue Book. ”By improving the integration of data at a fundamental level, we are able to analyze it in new and different ways. We can take a holistic view of the data to generate powerful insights for the organization. In addition, due to synergies with the Lunexa solution, we have been able to increase the ROI of our existing analytics infrastructure.”

The project at Kelley Blue Book, completed in less than three months, uses the pre-configured and customizable components in Lunexa’s Web Analytics solution. Lunexa’s solution includes a set of production-ready ETL routines to prepare data for loading into a pre-developed analytic data model and related reporting suite. Lunexa says their solution provides more than 70 out-of-the box reports and dashboards, allowing companies to leverage their in-house expertise to focus development efforts on creating reports and dashboards unique to their business and needs. 

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