Traditional databases, with index files and table spaces on disk and paging tables into memory, are becoming a thing of the past. Between search engines, which use large clusters of hardware and keep everything in memory, and memory-based databases, which…
Despite its dominance in the OLAP market, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) could be joining the growing ranks of vendors who see in-memory analytics as the future of business intelligence, according to a company that has worked with the software giant on…
Software review: When it comes to business applications for data mining and predictive analytics, one thing is certain: Businesses want to investigate and integrate these tools, but understanding how to use them can be a stumbling block. Vendors continue to…
More and more businesses of all sizes are using social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare, as a way to better engage customers and increase sales. However, just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account is…
A decade ago, enterprise resource planning (ERP) was the panacea for all enterprise ills (remember Y2K?). There were even several magazines devoted to the subject. But they all went away in the 2000-2002 tech downturn as the ERP hype died…
The typical user’s idea of mobile business intelligence is that of a cellphone performing analytics (reports, dashboards, ad-hoc queries) against a company database, just as smartphone access to Facebook provides social networking across the global Web, or just as we…
The International Institute for Analytics this week released nine predictions for business analytics in 2011 — including a prediction that it won’t take much economic growth next year to spark huge growth for analytics. IIA, founded by analytics researcher Tom…
The business purpose of a customer relationship management (CRM) system is to capture new customers faster, grow them more predictably, and keep them as loyal repeat customers. A CRM system should streamline the revenue business process and make every dollar…
Predictive analytics — the art of mining and analyzing historical data patterns to predict the future — is not a common term among IT types, let alone consumers. Yet predictive analytics is practiced widely, and its use affects millions of…
Open source business intelligence has been gaining momentum in recent years, so much so that it is even showing up in Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves. “Adoption of open source platforms will grow faster than adoption of commercial platforms,”…