Tag: analytics
Jan 21, 2015 |
Hadoop may be the top headliner when it comes to big data analytics, but it’s not the only game in town. A case in point is Interana, a Silicon Valley startup that today unveiled $20 million in funding to ramp up development of its tool for exploring massive amounts of time-series data. Interana‘s software is based on a distributed column-based database that enables fast access to vast amounts of time-series data. Running on X86 servers, the database itself can process Read more…
Jan 16, 2015 |
Data, data everywhere, but not a drop to use. Companies are increasingly confronted with floods of data, including “unstructured data” which is information from within email messages, social posts, phone calls, and other sources that isn’t easily put into a traditional column. Making sense and actionable recommendations from structured data is difficult, and doing so from unstructured data is even harder. Despite the challenge, the benefits can be substantial. Companies that commit to examining unstructured data that comes from devices Read more…
Jan 14, 2015 |
Figuring out how best to display a piece of data can be a big part of the big data analytics battle. When is a pie chart best, and where would a funnel graph work better? With the new Recommendations feature that TIBCO added to its Spotfire Cloud offering today, the software will automatically select a visualization for the user. According to TIBCO, the visualizations generated by Recommendations provide “built-in best practices” and help to eliminate the trial and error of Read more…
Nov 10, 2014 |
Data scientists make the bold promise of granting businesses the power to predict the future. The adoption of this relatively new job title has gained traction, as savvy companies seek to move beyond the rearview mirror of traditional business intelligence practices, and strive to implement customer segmentation, attribution models, churn analysis, and other next generation analytics. The current data scientist shortage may lead you to believe that the most difficult step is finding personnel to help your company achieve its Read more…
Oct 30, 2014 |
IBM dove headfirst into the Twitter-sphere yesterday when it announced a “landmark partnership” with the social media giant. The union will see Big Blue helping its blue chip customers perform sentiment analysis upon Twitter’s fire hose, with the goal of helping them make better business decisions. The joys and fears of 300 million people are embodied within the Twitter fire hose, which streams at the rate of about 6,000 tweets per second, or 500 million messages per day. Twitter, you Read more…
Oct 23, 2014 |
The free analytics question comes up over and over again, especially as it pertains to open source analytic offerings. I don’t think a day goes by when someone at a company doesn’t ask, “Why should I pay for analytics when I can use (fill in the blank) open source statistics/analytics?” You will find many lengthy discussions all over the Web on just this topic. Often the discussion is much more impassioned than it needs to be. I will address the Read more…
Oct 14, 2014 |
The rapid rise of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) this summer grabbed the world’s attention and led to military action by the U.S. and its allies. While drones and smart bombs pick apart ISIS from the air, you can be assured that American cyber warriors and defense analysts are using big data analytic techniques to glean insights about the group as well. Of course, the intelligence gathering and cyber warfare activities undertaken by the U.S. Read more…
Oct 2, 2014 |
Let’s face it: We all have seen a crazy Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or encountered one of its dreaded “Not Responding” messages. Unfortunately, the flexibility and ease of Excel makes it the ideal candidate for inappropriate use and widespread abuse. As the most widely used analytical tool in the world, Excel has indeed come a long way since the days of Visicalc and MultiPlan. Modern Excel 2013 and the latest Power BI add-ins do sizzle in demonstrations, but there are analyses Read more…
Sep 1, 2014 |
Mention ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) and eyes glaze over. The thought goes: “That stuff is old and meant for clunky enterprise data warehouses. What does it have to do with my Internet/Web/ecommerce application?” Quite a lot, actually. ETL did originate in enterprise IT where data from online databases is Extracted, then Transformed to normalize it and finally Loaded into enterprise data warehouses for analysis. Although Internet companies feel they have no use for expensive, proprietary data warehouses, the fact Read more…
Aug 29, 2014 |
Many people ask us why there doesn’t seem to be an accepted definition for Big Data in view of the massive press it receives. And given the amount of marketing effort expended by the global IT vendors who are targeting this bandwagon (and the venture-funded start-ups) they can be forgiven for being confused. Just as most consumer marketing – curiously – is focused on adolescent buyers with a fraction of the purchasing power of their parents and grandparents, so it Read more…
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