InetSoft Releases a New Version of Its BI Software
March 4, 2013
Business intelligence and analytics outfit InetSoft has released the latest version of its BI suite, Style Intelligence, we learn from “InetSoft Releases Style Intelligence 11.4” at the Technology Evaluation Centers’ blog. With this iteration, the company aims to ramp up support for both collaborative and self-service features. The write-up tells us:
“Some new key features include the ability to include annotations, which allow users to write comments on any dashboard and share them with team members, as well as bookmarks, which allow users to save the settings of a particular view, enabling users to get back to a certain pre-configured visualization to review or share with others.
“On the search side, Style Intelligence has been enhanced with features that allow users to perform search across report metadata to ease their discovery process.”
Writer Jorge Garcia notes that the platform’s data mashup features, combined with the communication tools mentioned above, make for easier collaboration and information-sharing.
Launched in 1996, InetSoft makes its home in Piscataway, New Jersey. The company deploys its business intelligence software to enterprises large and small, across industries, worldwide. Their focus on pleasing and interactive dashboards helps organizations ensure their end users make the most of their software investment.
Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Hong Kong Wants To Know
March 1, 2013
Hong Kong wants to improve government agencies with new technology and business initiatives for its citizens’ needs, says “Hong Kong Government Chooses SAS(R) Data Visualization To Improve Citizen Services” via Market Watch. As the headline states, the Hong Kong government selected SAS(R) Visual Analytics as the means for improvement. The Hong Kong Efficiency Unit heads the project and it will examine citizen complaint data using the SAS software. The hope is to find new insights and solutions based off the data. Some of SAS’s selling features are the ability to view data across multiple platforms and visual representations.
“’This is new for the Efficiency Unit: deploying transformative software from SAS to help us transform government services to better serve our citizens,’ said Wai-Fung Yuk, Assistant Director, Hong Kong Efficiency Unit. ‘SAS software will allow us to examine large amounts of complaint data and rapidly draw insights to make informed decisions. No matter how much data is involved, time to insight is crucial.’”
The Hong Kong Efficiency Unit probably chose SAS, because it is the largest independent BI vendor. SAS Visual Analytics has carved out a niche in the IT market not just for its data visualization, but also for the analytical correlations that it finds in seconds. Hong Kong has joined SAS in obtaining “the power to know.”
Whitney Grace, March 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Come Here, Watson. I Want a Cusp of Commercialization
February 28, 2013
For a moment, I thought I was reading a sitcom script. You judge for yourself. Navigate to “And Now, from IBM, It’s Chef Watson.” If you have an environmentally unfriendly version of the New York Times, you can find the script—sorry, real news story—on page B1 of the February 28, 2013, edition.
Let me highlight several phrases and sentences which I found amusing and somewhat troubling for those trying to convince people to license next generation search systems. Keep in mind that the point of the story is Watson, IBM’s next generation Jeopardy winning search system. The peripatetic Watson has done education, insurance, and cancer cracking. Now, Watson and its formidable technical amalgamation of open source and proprietary code is prepping for the Food Network.
IBM Watson’s is hunting for revenues and finding publicity. Can a $100 billion dollar entity find money in search, content processing, and analytics with a silicon Watson? Someday perhaps.
Here are the items I noted, highlighted in dark red and bold to make the words easy to spot:
First, this phrase, “…tries to expand its [IBM’s] artificial intelligence technology and turn turn Watson into something that actually makes commercial sense.” Reading this statement in the context of Hewlett Packard’s interesting commercial activities related to the write down of the spectacular $11 billion purchase of Autonomy is ripe with irony, probably unintentional too.
Second, I found the phrase “on the cusp of commercialization.” Interesting. The Jeopardy show aired in early 2011. A “cusp,” according to one of the online dictionaries is “A transitional point or time, as between two astrological signs.” Yep, I believe is astrology.
Scientists and Businesspeople Work Together for Big Data Research Solution
February 28, 2013
Ah, we’re pleased to see this real-world step with regard to big data. Science Daily informs us, “Solving Big-Data Bottleneck: Scientists Team with Business Innovators to Tackle Research Hurdles.” Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, and London Business School have partnered to apply the benefits of a commercial crowdsourcing platform to a significant challenge—finding a data-analysis program that can handle the complexities of biological research analysis. The article reveals:
“Partnering with TopCoder, a crowdsourcing platform with a global community of 450,000 algorithm specialists and software developers, researchers identified a program that can analyze vast amounts of data, in this case from the genes and gene mutations that build antibodies and T cell receptors. Since the immune system takes a limited number of genes and recombines them to fight a seemingly infinite number of invaders, predicting these genetic configurations has proven a massive challenge, with few good solutions.
“The program identified through this crowdsourcing experiment succeeded with an unprecedented level of accuracy and remarkable speed.”
This is certainly a worthy big-data application, and confirmation that folks from different disciplines can effectively work together to accelerate progress. Before the project could really get going, though, the biologists had to translate their query into less-specialized language for the TopCoder community. After that, the viable suggestions came rolling in, and researchers picked their solution from an array of good choices. (Alas, the article does not disclose which software was selected.)
Researchers see more cross-discipline projects in the future; Harvard Business School’s Karim Lakhani notes that existing platforms and communities can provide a speedy alternative to the creation of custom data-analysis solutions. Yes, let’s hear it for cooperation!
Cynthia Murrell, February 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How Does That Make You Feel: Excel Gets Sentiment Analysis Add-In
February 26, 2013
Semantria LLC has announced the launch of its sentiment analysis add-in for Microsoft Excel. This is important because it brings a new facet to the already worldwide software by adding not only sentiment analysis but query based categorization to the fold.
“Semantria Introduces The Unique Excel Add-In 2.0 With Advanced Functionality and New Capabilities,” pretty much lays it on the line for consumers. Powered by Lexalytics technology, Semantria’s text analysis REST API will be able to identify the polarity of a document as well as break it down for separate sentiment signals for each theme, keyword, category and query.
“David Henzel, VP Marketing at NetDNA, explains “We use Semantria’s sentiment analysis for our customer survey and social media analytics, and get great results back in seconds.” And, he adds, “The best part is it runs in one of the world’s most common user environments: Microsoft Excel.””
Sentiment analysis is a pretty cool concept that has already been utilized by many well known social media sites, perhaps none so much as Twitter. Sentiment analysis allows for an intelligence analysis of human feeling through a document.
The question is how well will this add-in translate with Excel? Will it be a match made in heaven or will it be a disaster on a platter? I tend to lean toward the former. Being able to utilize sentiment analysis for query purposes is unique and appealing to mass audiences.
Leslie Radcliff, February 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IBM Launching New Collaborative Communications Products Including Upgrade to Connections
February 26, 2013
The IBM announcement that it will be rolling out new communication products and new upgrades for its existing social networking product, Connections hasn’t really come as a big shock to many. IBM has spent time and money acquiring new technologies and working to integrate those technologies.
CIO’s “IBM To Beef Up Content Management, Analytics In Connections Enterprise Social Product,” takes consumers through some of the basic changes they can expect to see when the products are unveiled on Monday at Connect 2013.
“At a press conference after the session, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM’s Software Solutions Group, said that the impact of enterprise social technologies in collaboration and front-office business processes like HR and marketing amounts to a “generational shift” that is transforming how companies function, and will do so for the next two decades.”
We aren’t really told which acquisitions are responsible for which upgrades and integrations but if IBM’s dreams come true, the new content management function of Connections will rival that of Microsoft’s SharePoint, a big assertion for sure.
The IBM Employee Experience Suite is one of the few newly designed products that fully explains where the new upgrades came from, in this instance, the human resource management apps are courtesy of the $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa.
While still a little cloudy on the content, it will be interesting to keep an eye on IBM over the next year and not just at its product reveal early next week. It’s a sink or swim time in business technology with so many up and coming developers and technologies just waiting in the wings for an opportunity. We’ll see how IBM continues to stack up.
Leslie Radcliff, February 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Another Palantir Push: But Little Hard Financial Data. Why Not?
February 23, 2013
I was reading about the TED Conference’s yo-yo presentation. My eye drifted across an expanse of cellulose and landed on “The Humane Way to Crack Terrorists.” (This link will go dead so be aware that you may have to pay to read the item online.) The subtitle was one of those News Corp. Google things: “Big data may make enhanced interrogation obsolete.” The source? Some minor blog from America’s hinterland, Silicon Valley? Nope. The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2013, page C 12.
What’s the subject – really? The answer, in my opinion, Palantir. If you monitor the flagship, traditional media, Palantir has a solid track record of getting written about in print magazines. I suppose that the folks who have pumped about $150 million into the “big data” company read those magazines and the Wall Street Journal type publications each day. I know I do, and I am an addled goose in rural Kentucky, the high tech nerve center of the new industrial revolution. After February 28, 2013, I am not sure about the economy, however.
Here’s the passage I noted:
There’s a tellingly brief passage in “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden” by Mark Bowden. “The hunt for bin Laden and others eventually drew on an unfathomably rich database,” he writes. “Sifting through it required software capable of ranging deep and fast and with keen discernment—a problem the government itself proved less effective at solving than were teams of young software engineers in Silicon Valley. A startup called Palantir, for instance, came up with a program that elegantly accomplished what TIA [Terrorism Information Awareness program, set up in 2002] had set out to do.” When I met the chief executive and co-founder of Palantir, Alex Karp, recently, he was straightforward: “It is my personal belief that flawless data integration at any kind of scale, with a rigorous access control model, allows analysts to perform operations that are only intrusive on the data. They are not intrusive on human beings.” Obviously, Palantir doesn’t comment on classified work. But its technological phalanx—processing countless leads, from flight manifests to tapped phone calls, into one resource for people to interpret—is known to have been key in locating bin Laden. The company, founded in 2004, has large contracts across the intelligence community and is enterprise-wide at the FBI. Its first client was the CIA.
Nifty stuff. Palantir has high profile clients like intelligence and law enforcement outfits. But where is a hedge fund or a consumer products company? Allegedly the fancy math technology can work wonders. The implication is that outfits like Digital Reasoning, Recorded Future, and even Tibco are not in Palantir’s league. Oh, really? What about outfits like IBM and Oracle and SAS? Nah. Palantir seems to be where the good stuff happens in the context of this Wall Street Journal article.
In my view, the write up triggered several notes on my ubiquitous 4×6 paper note cards, just like the ones I used in high school debate competitions:
First, what about that legal dust up with i2 Group? Here’s a link to refresh one’s memory. I recall that there was also some disagreement, a few real media stories, and then a settlement regarding sector leader i2. Note: I did some work years ago for this out, which is now owned by IBM. Oh, and after the settlement silence. Just what was that legal dispute about anyway? The Wall Street Journal story does not touch on that obviously trivial issue related to the legal matter. Why not? The space in the newspaper was probably needed to cover the yo-yo guy.
Second, can software emulate the motion picture approach to reality? In my experience, numerical recipes can be useful, but they can also provide some points which are subject to contention. A recent example is the gentleman’s disagreement about an electric vehicle. Data, analyses, and interpretations—muddled. Not like the motion pictures’ tidiness and quite final end point. “The end” solves a lot of fictional problems. Life is less clear, a lot less clear in my experience.
Third, how is Palantir doing as a business? After all, the story ran in the Wall Street Journal, which is about business. I appreciate the references to a motion picture, but I am curious about how Palantir is doing on its march to generate a billion or more in revenues. At some point, the investors are going to look at the money pumped into Palantir, the time spent developing the magical technology which warrants metaphorical juxtaposition to Hollywood outputs, and the profitability of the company’s sales. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal do the business thing? Revenue, commercial customers, and case studies which do not flaunt words which Bing and Google love to consume in their indexing systems?
It is Saturday, and I suppose I there are lots of 20 somethings working at 0900 Eastern as I write this. They will fill the gap. I will have to wait. I wonder if the predictive algorithms from Palantir can tell me how long before hard facts become available?
One final question: If this Palantir type of system worked, why aren’t the firms in this Palantir-type software sector dominating in financial services, marketing, and consumer products? I wonder if the reason is that fancy math generates high expectations and then creates some situations in which reality does not work just like a cinema thriller?
Stephen E Arnold, February 23, 2013
Information Builders Recognized in Annual Gartner BI Report
February 23, 2013
Yep, it is the good old magic quadrant. One firm is trumpeting its inclusion in Gartner Research‘s annual BI report, we learn from “Information Builders Positioned as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms,” posted at Reuters. The well-established Information Builders was happy to find itself in the Leaders Quadrant of that report, based on an evaluation of its WebFOCUS BI suite. The press release reveals:
“According to the report, the BI and analytics platform is ‘a software platform that delivers 15 capabilities across three categories: integration, information delivery, and analysis.’ In the report, Gartner states: ‘This emphasis on data discovery from most of the leaders in the market—which are now promoting tools with business-user-friendly data integration, coupled with embedded storage and computing layers (typically in-memory/columnar) and unfettered drilling—accelerates the trend toward decentralization and user empowerment of BI and analytics, and greatly enables organizations’ ability to perform diagnostic analytics.'”
The WebFOCUS suite is integrated with the company’s iWay data adapters, and both are increasingly available on mobile devices. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in New York City, Information Builders supplies data-management and analysis solutions to organizations worldwide. The company prides itself on innovation and superior customer service.
Cynthia Murrell, February 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Businesses Require Scalability Seen in PolySpot Solutions for Big Data Needs
February 22, 2013
Whether companies are in the exploratory phase or have already implemented their initiatives, they are talking about big data to some extent. CIO points out an interesting dilemma some companies may be facing in their recent article, “Big Data is a Solution Looking for a Problem.” With all the hype, some companies may have forgotten to ask what problem they wanted to solve by using big data.
Big Data is forecasted to drive $34 billion of IT spending in 2013 and create 4.4 million IT jobs by 2015. In light of those numbers, there must be some major problems that companies want to address.
One of the biggest variables companies are looking at is how much data they need to hold onto for storage and analysis:
A lot of other industries are simply looking for ways to manage and monetise their data assets – and Big Data is not always the answer, according to Logan. There are plenty of off-the-shelf software programs that can visualise large data sets, and in some cases the best solution may be to simply throw some of the data away.
Finding a big data solution with the capacity for scaling will help increase the company’s ROI. An organization may not have petabytes of data to undergo analytics today but they might need that capability tomorrow. Solutions like PolySpot have scaling capabilities that growing businesses require as they are increasingly driven to find more opportunities and insights from their data on hand.
Megan Feil, February 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Oracle Endeca
February 21, 2013
It appears that Oracle is effectively marketing its search acquisition, Endeca. The company’s blog posts a piece on its business intelligence features in, “Transforming Workforce Management with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery.” Meanwhile, the Quest 4 ATG blog shares some migration tips for the commerce platform in its piece, “Stepping into Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.1.”
Oracle’s BI post asserts that Human Resources is where the action is for companies right now, but that the challenges of accessing unstructured data can stand in the way of making the best decisions in that area. Their Endeca Information Discovery, they say, can help by:
- Understanding the voice and sentiment of the workforce. By providing the ability to use natural-language queries to derive insights from information from all sources, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provides insight into the effectiveness of strategic and tactical HR decisions. . . .
- Identifying the root causes behind events and exceptions. . . . HR organizations are empowered to determine the reasons why things happen and respond to findings without direct IT involvement, saving time and cost.
- Supercharging existing business analytics investments. With the unscripted exploration of workforce data and full-featured search, navigation & interactive analytics, HR organizations can leverage, improve, and extend existing investments in workforce analytics and HCM applications.
The post at Quest 4 ATG is more of a practical matter. It documents that blogger’s migrations from Endeca Commerce version 3.1.0 to version 3.1.1. Clearly described in outline form, with illustrations, these instructions are good to note (and bookmark) if you, too, need to migrate.
Cynthia Murrell, February 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
