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…
“Store everything” and “analyze everything” are popular IT mantras, leading companies to build data lakes and use data analytics software. But that begs an important question. What kinds of business benefits can you gain from a business intelligence project? More…
Digital transformation is challenging enterprises in numerous ways, from determining who should lead digital initiatives to modifying infrastructure to better support the cloud computing, mobile, social media and Big Data analytics technologies that are central to digital business efforts. “There…
by Rex Ahlstrom, BackOffice Associates As enterprises look into 2016, they are faced with new and continually more complex data challenges to solve across their global operations. However, evolving technologies and innovative information governance approaches are helping organizations manage their…
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,…
How important is data preparation when it comes to analytics success? It is so important, said Mike Gualtieri, an analyst at Forrester Research, that some data analysts spend more than three quarters of their time preparing data: calculating aggregate fields,…
The Apache Software Foundation is rolling out a new top level project this week, and it’s one that didn’t first have to undergo the typical project incubation phase. Apache Arrow, an effort to build columnar in-memory analytics technology that could…
While many vendors sell analytics software, not all of them provide predictive analytics, a far more specialized field. Unlike more traditional analytics, predictive analytics typically involves sophisticated techniques such as predictive modeling, data mining, machine learning and statistical algorithms. The…
If you want to know what’s likely to happen in your business, you need predictive analytics. Predictive analytics is distinct from descriptive analytics, which shows what happened and when, and diagnostic analytics, which deals with why events happened in the…