Inteltrax: Top Stories, October 24 to October 28
October 31, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, the economic challenges that are realized and overcome thanks to the use of big data and analytics.
The best example of this situation that we found came from our story, “BI’s a Part of Germany’s Strong Economy,” http://inteltrax.com/?p=2647 showcased the fascinating trend of how one of the few thriving European economies is directly tied to business intelligence and data analytics.
The story, “Analytic Jobs a Possible Economic Solution,” http://inteltrax.com/?p=2652 discussed how analytic work has been steady while other industries dry up. Could data analysis be the fix to sluggish economies?
Another economic staple, FICO credit scores, were magnified in the story, “Pushing 60, FICO Adjusts to Analytics.” http://inteltrax.com/?p=2655 Here, we discovered how the credit giant takes the massive amounts of personal data to streamline its analytic system.”
No matter how you slice it, economics is a hot topic these days. We were pleased to discover a positive side to this talk when paired with analytics. We are optimistic about this union in the future and will continue giving it our attention at IntelTrax.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
October 31, 2011
Datameer Creates Analytics Platform for Hadoop
October 31, 2011
Software development company Datameer has come up with another Hadoop business intelligence play to maintain the compounded 40 percent per year growth rate in corporate data volume, with the lion’s share of the growth in unstructured data, being produced and consumed.
There are current technical challenges that need to be addressed. Hadoop is moving out costly analytic databases and warehouses, in its push forward has given us yet another crazy acronym—ADBMS. Now Hadoop vendors keeping the Big Data market in a state of churn.
In the Datameer blog write up “Why I Am at Datameer” Brian Smith discusses a potential solution to this issue. He asserted:
Datameer is the first BI/Analytics platform built natively on Hadoop. On the surface it sounds interesting, but in practice the solution is game-changing. The Datameer Analytic Solution (DAS) connects business users directly with the entire volume and variety of their raw Hadoop data and makes it available for comprehensive analysis.
While Smith’s assertions are certainly interesting, we are not sure who is “first” in many of the assertions about the Big Data world. IBM is chugging away. Digital Reasoning is a player. There are, in fact, dozens of companies making claims and counter-claims. Perhaps in a dicey economy, marketing takes precedence over cold, hard facts?
Jasmine Ashton, October 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Big Data for Big Thinkers
October 31, 2011
“Big data analytics” is an emerging term in the storage industry that originated within the open source community to develop analytics processes that were faster and more scalable than traditional data warehousing.
Open source advocates hope to use data to extract value from the vast amounts of unstructured data produced daily by web users. I recently read an interesting Karmasphere write up called “Big Data IS Different— I Knew It!” in which Rich Guth mused about his past year spent at Karmasphere. In the period, his opinion of Big Data requires different analytic techniques than traditional business intelligence products provide. Guth asserted:
Today we announced version 1.5 of our Karmasphere Analyst product, a workspace for performing Big Data Analytics. It implements a new workflow for data analysts to mine and analyze Big Data. We also released a whitepaper “Deriving Intelligence from Big Data in Hadoop – A Big Data Analytics Primer” that describes this workflow, discusses why this workflow is necessary and compares it to traditional BI and data warehousing approaches.
The challenge is to make clear exactly what “old methods” will not work and which “new methods” will work. As important, how does a person using a system with new Big Data methods determine if the outputs are accurate. Who wants to make a decision only to find out that the underlying set up of the new methods were off the mark. Most business intelligence professionals don’t know when an old and well worn method is delivering accurate outputs. Toss in a snappy graphic and the disconnect may become significant.
Jasmine Ashton, October 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: The Top Fortune 500 SharePoint Users
October 31, 2011
Protected: Useful Claims-Based Authentication White Paper
October 28, 2011
Twitter as a Predictor
October 27, 2011
Rhyme and alliteration accompany Twitter. Example: Twitter trending topics are often a big hit or miss when it comes to reflecting evolving events, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement.
However, that isn’t stopping an emerging industry aimed at using tweets of millions of people to help predict the future. How is this possible? By following certain terms surrounding everything from disease, elections, and finance, you can gain insight into what may happen. For example, during the Egyptian revolution earlier this year, there was a high correlation between tweets and actual events. There is even a hedge fund called Derwent Capital Markets that makes stock and fund trades based on Twitter analysis, and it is actually fairing well.
“Can Watching Twitter Trends Help Predict the Future?” on GigaOM tells us more:
The theory behind all of this Twitter-mining is that the network has become such a large-scale, real-time information delivery system (handling more than a quarter of a billion messages every day, according to CEO Dick Costolo at the recent Web 2.0 conference) that it should be possible to analyze those tweets and find patterns that produce some kind of collective intelligence about a topic. It’s the same idea that drives companies to do “data mining” on their customers’ behavior…
Will this become a “must have” tool for researchers, medical staff, and politicians. Even the U.S. government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Unit is looking into using data from social media as part of its intelligence gathering. But is passivity better than active research? We think one needs both. Judgment helps too.
Andrea Hayden, October 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Tableau 6.1 Available for Apple iPad
October 25, 2011
App mania is in full stride.
Seattle based rapid-fire business intelligence software producer, Tableau Software, http://www.tableausoftware.com/ has gained recognition for performing “simple business analytics,” has now made Tableau 6.1 available for public use and can be made available on the iPad. This is important because most apps insulate the user from of the messy fiddling old style enterprise applications required. Some were beyond the MBA and required a programmer, who, in theory, could verify that data were clean and the functions appropriate to the data set available.
The Tableau blog post “Tableau Makes Business Intelligence Faster and Mobile” states:
The new version delivers automatic touch and gesture optimized support for the Apple iPad, whether views are accessed via Tableau’s new iPad App or via Mobile Safari. In addition, Tableau enhanced its in-memory analytics engine with increased query and loading performance. People can also rapidly update existing extracts in Tableau’s data engine. Other improvements include localization and new maps.”
In addition to having an even faster in-memory data engine, what’s really cool about this new version is that through the new iPad app, you can still create quick and easy interactive dashboards and reports from both Tableau Server and Tableau Public. There is no need for up-front design changes or maintaining multiple versions of workbooks to serve multiple platforms and when a view is accessed from the iPad, Tableau automatically detects and optimizes the user experience.
Several observations:
- Will end users know what data delivered the output?
- Are the data fresh? How will end users know?
- Will end users make a decision based on a graph and some highlights?
Our thought is, “Many users will accept what’s on the iPad as accurate.” In some situations, the assumption may be incorrect by a little or a lot.
For more information on Tableau 6.1 and any other Tableau happenings, feel free to check out the company blog.
Jasmine Ashton, October 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, October 17 to October 21
October 24, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, the ups and downs for some of the industry’s biggest names.
Those in the know about cloud computing were surprised to see our story, “Amazon Analytics Experiences Setbacks,” http://inteltrax.com/?p=2591 since the book and cloud giant’s analytics offerings aren’t taking off like its Kindle.
On the upswing, we offered “Jaspersoft Climbing the BI Competition Ladder” http://inteltrax.com/?p=2595 detailing how one of our favorite BI vendors has made some bold moves pay off recently.
Back on the negative side of the spectrum, “Google Analytics Gets Weaker in Germany” http://inteltrax.com/?p=2588 tough data mining laws are keeping the search king from knowing too much about Germany’s users.
This is just a taste of the news we deliver. There’s never any telling from day-to-day when a major player will suffer a blow and when a little guy will climb higher. Sometimes vice versa. So we watch the big data game like a hawk, showing all sides of the story to give readers a full view of the roller coaster ride.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting http://www.inteltrax.com/
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
October 24, 2011
Microsoft Gets Some Open Source Ideas
October 21, 2011
Wired reported on some good news for the open source community recently with their article, “Microsoft Embraces Elephant of Open Source.”
Even though Microsoft had an inaugural Hadoop back in 2008, we could hardly say they had an affinity for the open source giant then. In fact, I don’t even think we could say that about them now, even with their plan to integrate the platform with future versions of its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform cloud, Windows Azure, an online service for hosting and readily scaling applications.
This does however, show they are serious about Hadoop, unlike their relationship last year with OpenStack. Microsoft’s engineers are even investing by providing the coding for this Hadoop integration.
According to the article, the strengthening of this Microsoft-Hadoop partnership isn’t just coming out of nowhere. Wired reports that general manager of product management for SQL Server Doug Leland said:
There have certainly been requests from our [SQL Server and Windows Azure] customers to embrace Hadoop and deliver an enterprise-class distribution of the platform that’s built into the Windows infrastructure and is easily managed within that infrastructure,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.
It appears that this is set to be a steady long-term relationship; we can hear Open Source advocates cheering from all around. The question, of course, is, “Will open source survive Microsoft’s love and attention?”
Megan Feil, October 20, 2011
Too Much Data? Digital Reasoning Has a Solution
October 21, 2011
More and more businesses are turning to companies specializing in analytics to simplify the massive amounts of data and turn that data into meaningful information. Digital Reasoning is one such company and a recent interview with Robert Metcalf, president, as found on the company’s website sheds light on Digital Reasoning’s past, present and optimistic future.
The company was born in 2000 in Franklin, Tennessee, and has had some impressive accomplishments in its first decade. Synthesys, its technology’s name, was chosen in 2009 by the United States Army Intelligence as the core of its INSCOM Enterprise Platform.
Alongside government entities, Digital Reasoning also supplies analytics to the commercial sector. One of the questions asked during the interview was what are the challenges servicing both government and commercial industries. According to Metcalf that challenge of providing a service that can be made applicable across several industries is one of the components that makes Synthesys unique and gives Digital Reasoning an edge in the market.
When asked about the accomplishments over the last year, Metcalf said:
…we are very pleased with the course over the last number of months, and particularly over the course of this year, the strides we’ve made with regard to our technology, particularly with respect to the work we’ve done with our analytics, our algorithms, and our approach to unstructured data, and leveraging some great technologies in Hadoop and Cassandra and seeing those things continue to mature and scale as our product and product roadmap continues to be developed.
Metcalf also reported that he believes the last ten years have been spent trying to sort through all the data that companies by which companies are bombarded. While that is a useful process and quite necessary he sees the next ten years moving toward finding meaning within the data. That is where Digital Reasoning comes in useful and Metcalf anticipates a surge in interest in the company as a result.
All and all, Digital Reasoning is poised to explode in the market of data analysis and vertical filing. With its ducks seemingly in a row and successes already under its belt, this sophomore company gets a big thumbs up from us.
Catherine Lamsfuss, October 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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