For some time now there has been much buzz around the idea of getting more data into the hands of “ordinary” business users. A slew of tools that help users with data preparation and data analysis tasks are entering the…
Over the last two years, the increasing relative cost advantages of Flash memory have driven a new area of competitive advantage in analytics: the ability to deliver real-time and near-real-time analytics on Big Data (aka Fast Data) that comes from…
Sales analytics in traditional CRM systems, like other types of analytics, have largely provided “after the fact” analysis instead of insights that can actually influence outcomes. That is beginning to change, however, with a growing emphasis on real-time information. Clari,…
Providing the infrastructure for both Big Data and the newer Fast Data is not yet a matter of applying cookie-cutter “best practices.” Both require significant tuning or changing of both hardware and software infrastructure, and the newer Fast Data architectures…
As vendors and users testified at last month’s In-Memory Computing Summit, the relatively low cost of flash memory is driving databases and apps toward leveraging Fast Data – mobile and sensor cloud data – using systems whose storage is predominantly…
For several years Hadoop-based alternatives to traditional SQL databases have been the focus of user attention. After all they are cheap or open source, well versed in public cloud environments and, in many cases, scalable to larger amounts of Big…
Data lakes are drawing new attention these days, as Gartner criticizes the idea and EMC touts a “data lake” product. There is mass confusion about just what a data lake is. The real value of the notion of a data…
Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud corporate performance (CPM) management software, unveiled this week a new service called Adaptive Solutions that aims to help customers more quickly and easily deploy CPM apps by providing a collection of pre-configured best practices…
The ongoing popularity of the Hadoop approach to data management should not blind us to the opportunities offered by other database technologies – technologies that, when used in the proper mix, can deliver adequate scaling to meet the demands of…
My third assessment of business intelligence focuses on upcoming technologies that may or may not have a significant positive impact on effective use of BI. It is done in the spirit of one of President Lyndon Johnson’s most meaningless quotes,…
In my last article, I took a look at the basics of business intelligence: its purpose (giving the business on an ongoing basis its current state, e.g., sales, profits and losses), its typical architecture (data warehouse plus supporting software and…
The purpose of business Intelligence (BI) solutions is pretty much the same as the purpose of “military intelligence”: to give commanders at every stage of a campaign a good view of the battlefield and the pros and cons of their…
By Rado Kotorov Data visualization is fast becoming an area of interest for organizations seeking to benefit from the wealth of structured and unstructured data in the enterprise. Solutions are emerging to meet this need, but before companies make a…
Companies that want to adopt cloud-based enterprise applications seemingly face some daunting challenges when it comes to integrating them with on-premise apps or even other cloud apps. As Loraine Lawson wrote on IT Business Edge, citing InformationWeek’s State of Cloud…
IBM’s Watson software offers a new and distinctly different approach to analyzing data. It differs from more traditional approaches in three key ways: It understands much more of the “semantics” of information – the assumptions and implicit meanings behind it…
In the social sciences areas of academia, qualitative research is a hot topic – which usually means that it turns out to be highly useful in understanding your business’ customers, in B2B or in consumer markets. Moreover, the software tools…
Adoption of mobile apps in the enterprise shows no signs of slowing, based on research from Good Technology. Its Mobility Index for the fourth quarter of 2013 indicates 54 percent growth in the use of mobile applications. This increase outpaces…
The technologies collectively known as SMAC – social, mobile, analytics and cloud – are impacting business in ways almost too numerous to count. One clear trend is their ability to give small and medium size businesses (SMBs) access to some…
The promise of predictive analytics seems straightforward and powerful: semi-automated, flexible tools that allow us to predict customer and supply-chain trends better and quicker, leveraging Big Data for more cost-effective implementation of strategies. And yet, one of the principles of…
There has been a lot of focus on the first big value-add insight one gets from Big Data analytics, but not a lot on why you should keep on going after that. To keep deriving value from Big Data, I…
Anecdotal evidence and analyst firm surveys suggest a big surge in demand for Hadoop experts. In fact, the demand far outstrips the supply. So what should IT do if the requisite experts aren’t available? First, let’s consider the reason for…
At a recent conference, Dave Turek of IBM asserted that the future computing architecture would have data rather than computation “at the center.” What he is saying, I believe, is that enterprise IT-related differentiation and competitive advantage now derives from…
As I was at a vendor conference recently that brought this to mind, I will write on something that is less about the vendor and more about what I view as major opportunities for software technology going forward. In this…
Increasing numbers of IT shops are considering, and in some cases doing, “Hadoop in the enterprise.” That is, they are more or less implementing the file systems and data-access mechanisms (Hadoop, MapReduce) of a cloud provider, and using them to…
The good news: At a recent IBM conference on Big Data, users confirmed a growing body of evidence from sources such as Sloan Management Review, showing that success in Big Data does deliver bottom-line, competitive-advantage benefits. The bad news: There…
A recent Sloan Management Review continuation of their studies of successful Big Data practitioners highlights an often-misunderstood strategy of these “best-practice” users. Specifically, Analytical Innovators (as SMR calls them) value reducing costs less than several other foci: Gaining customer knowledge…
A recent post in MIT Technology Review about the use of Big Data in the 2012 election offers fascinating insights into what works – and what doesn’t. Both political parties had operations specifically designed to glean new insights about voters…
As sentiment analysis continues to attract organizations’ strategic attention as an effective way to understand the customer, a new danger emerges – that organizations will simply gather up initial results and use them to fine-tune present strategies. For example, banks…
For the last couple of years, IT shops abetted by vendors and consultants like Aberdeen Group and Forrester Research have been focusing on achieving “agility” in the use of analytics and business intelligence via self-service capabilities. The idea is that…
As enterprises fine-tune their ability to understand what customers and the market are really saying – in the face of social-media data so massive that its entry into the cloud sometimes has to be delayed to achieve “data consistency” –…
It can get hard to discern what makes agile business intelligence effective, with vendors insisting that flexibility, do-it-yourself BI for end users, and hiring a few scrum developers “automagically” delivers agile BI. However, the secret to effective business intelligence is…
Although SAP is putting its HANA in-memory database at the center of its analytics strategy, it obviously wants to continue to offer other database options to its customers. Today the software giant rolled out four new analytics editions of its…
Recently, the agile marketing movement has really been getting its act together. As in the previous case of agile software development, it has linked individual proponents into a common cause, agreed on a tentative set of “values” and “principles” and…
Tools used to enable and facilitate agile business intelligence are constantly evolving and changing. Moreover, agile tools are often multi-purpose, applying to BI app development or to marketing projects using BI with somewhat equal facility; so you may be more…
I have written before on the large potential for bottom-line business improvement through agile business intelligence. Now, increasingly, there is a significant use case. No, I’m not referring to agile software development applied to business intelligence tool “app” upgrade; that…
Those who have seen many of my writings know that (a) I believe firmly, based on existing evidence, that increased agility is a net bottom-line benefit for just about any organization, and (b) I have high standards for what constitutes…
Enterprise Apps Today recently published a column by Infostructure Associates’ Wayne Kernochan , who encourages IT buyers to begin evaluating embedded analytics solutions. As the technology matures, he says, it will offer benefits at least equal to the much-hyped Big…
IBM’s recent acquisition of Tealeaf Technology, a maker of customer experience management and analytics software, signals a growing interest in using analytics technologies to perfect marketing campaigns, particularly by offering customers more personalized experiences across multiple channels. FICO, an analytics…
As the popularity of Apache Hadoop continues to increase, so do the partnerships for Hortonworks, a provider of Hadoop services and support and Hadoop-compatible software. Microsoft and Teradata are among prominent tech vendors on the growing list of Hortonworks’ partners.…
With all the hype about Big Data analytics, a more down-in-the-details yet highly useful new application of analytics has been obscured: embedded analytics. More specifically, I am talking about middle-tier analytics, the area that embedded analytics will aim for in…
Business intelligence has taken a step forward in maturity over the last few years, as statistical packages have become more associated with analytics. SAS has for years distinguished itself by its statistics-focused business intelligence solution; but when IBM acquired SPSS,…
A couple of years ago, columnar databases were a hot topic in business intelligence circles; today, not so much. Yet a quick scan of the Transaction Processing Council’s top 10 list for its TPC-H business intelligence benchmark (as of 1/23/12)…
The hype about agile business intelligence is getting out of hand. IT will probably suffer for it. A recent, egregious example was an EMC ad for a webcast headlined “Why Big Data is the Answer to Business Agility.” The text…
One of the songs in the musical “Oklahoma!” involves a politician attempting to persuade farmers and ranchers to be friends, so they can present a united appeal for statehood. Of course, says the rancher, I’m happy to be friends, even…
Recently, IBM (NYSE: IBM) released a study of worldwide CMOs (chief marketing officers), their concerns and their plans. The study established yet another sea change in marketing’s responsibilities – and therefore in the type of business intelligence that should be…
When I set out to write this article, I thought I could assume a basic understanding of data virtualization (DV) in readers and focus on the neat new benefits to agile business intelligence from using DV to combine Big Data…
One of the more interesting features of vendors’ recent marketing push to sell business intelligence and analytics is the emphasis on the notion of Big Data, often associated with NoSQL, Google MapReduce, and Apache Hadoop, but without a clear explanation…
As if the advent of agile business intelligence wasn’t enough of a puzzle, IT buyers are now being asked to wrap their minds around the notion of mobile business intelligence. There are several head-scratching features of mobile BI as it…
One of the most fundamental decisions that business intelligence implementers in IT make, at the beginning of every new BI initiative, is whether the new data involved should be copied into a central data mart or data warehouse or accessed…
A recent IBM survey shows that 76% of CEOs view “insight and intelligence” as key to corporate success over the next 5 years – slightly behind “getting close to the customer” and “people skills” – and that, in response, 83%…