Big Data Headlines Roundup
March 22, 2013
Data Knowledge Center rounds up some of the Big Data headlines from the last week in its article, “HP, Dell Announce New Big Data Analytics Solutions.” The article covers major players from Datastax to Dell but opens with a discussion of HP’s ArcSight.
The article begins:
“HP (HPQ) announced new offerings to help organizations to gain security intelligence from large data sets to better detect and prevent threats. The security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities of HP ArcSight with the HP Autonomy IDOL content analytics engine automatically recognizes the context, concepts, sentiments and usage patterns related to how users interact with all forms of data. Art Gilliland, Enterprise Security Products, HP, said, ‘With the integration of cloud monitoring, content analytics and Big Data processing, HP provides clients with the context needed to effectively stop potential breaches.’”
There are definite up and comers in the Big Data realm, but many new customers to the market will want to go with a trusted solution. LucidWorks offers LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data, both of which are standards in the field, based on the open source power of Apache Lucene and Solr. Open source also brings the benefits of flexibility and affordability in addition to security.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Google Dabbles in Big Data and Works Toward Disambiguation
March 20, 2013
The ambiguous nature of language is a subtlety that is really only grasped by the human mind. Computers aren’t able to disambiguate the mumbo jumbo that is the human language. Mercury is mercury to a computer; it doesn’t matter whether it is Freddie, the planet, the car, an element or any of the other plethora of possibilities.
In “Learning From Big Data: 40 Million Entities in Context” Google (go figure, the company is becoming the proverbial duct tape of the technology world) is hoping to change all of that.
“To provide that help, we are releasing the Wikilinks Corpus: 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages…The mentions are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If we think of each page on Wikipedia as an entity (an idea we’ve discussed before), then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity.”
It will allow searchers to co-reference search terms and search across documents that are similar in nature and work on subsets of data. Let’s face it, if it works…there will be a lot of time and money saved and a lot of headaches will go away. If it doesn’t, Google may want to rethink its foray into the Big Data arena.
Leslie Radcliff, March 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data Search Made Better with LucidWorks
March 19, 2013
LucidWorks has caught the attention of Mark Smith at Ventana Research. He takes a deeper looks at the LucidWorks search and Big Data offerings in his open letter, “Big Data Search is Getting Better with LucidWorks.”
Smith sums up the LucidWorks’ offerings:
“LucidWorks has two product offerings in the search market. LucidWorks Search provides the ability to rapidly set up search and index content using Apache Solr. The company not only provides full commercial-grade support and services and a security framework, but has also improved on Solr’s usability for developers and business users. Solr, built on top of Lucene, is an enterprise platform that provides full-text search, dynamic clustering, geospatial search and other enterprise-class capabilities . . . LucidWorks is definitely a vendor to examine if you are looking to bring enterprise-class search to your organization and big data deployments.”
It is no surprise that LucidWorks is catching the eye of a global research organization. Enterprise search, and Big Data specifically, is on the lips of all developers these days. It is good to know that research is available to steer buyers in the right direction. LucidWorks seems to be well-supported, and a great value.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Sinequa Hosts Big Data Roundtable
March 18, 2013
Sinequa will participate in Documentation 2013 at La Défense in Paris, France. This conference is a nexus for professionals and senior managers who are looking for ways to improve their information systems. The focus is on Big Data. Sinequa is located in Booth G12.
At the show, Sinequa will be demonstrating its unified information access platform. The co9mpany’s solution is based on a powerful search engine. The system is designed to handle larger volumes of data from various sources.
Participating in the Big Data Roundtable in the Thematic Conference room on Wednesday 20 March at 11h30 pm for a debate on the subject of “Enterprises facing Big Data: How to deal with vast volumes of heterogeneous data and extract useful information from it?”
Participants will be Hans-Josef Jeanrond, Marketing Director, Sinequa; Frédéric Brajon, Digital Information Strategy Director, CGI Business Consulting; and Mountaha Ndiaye, Regional Channel Sales & Alliances manager, EMC².
Sinequa is one of the leaders in the market of Enterprise Search and Unified Information Access, one of the technologies included the emerging Big Data market. The company provides large enterprises and administrations with the means to tame the complexity of their structured and unstructured data and to extract value from large volumes of very heterogeneous data. More information about Sinequa is available at www.sinequa.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 18, 2013
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Visisimo Marketing Director Talks Vast Possibilities with Big Data
March 16, 2013
While anyone with their ear to the ground probably already knows that Vivisimo is expanding on its marketing efforts to be classified as a big data leader, all of the implications may not have been revealed just yet. A recent Pittsburgh Business TImes article, “A Big Discussion on Big Data,” clued us in.
IBM’s program director of big data marketing, Saman Haqqi, was included on a panel hosted last week at IBM. The panel was organized by MIT Enterprise Forum of Pittsburgh.
The article offered some insight into her perspective:
“Living in a world where data is everywhere and a huge amount of what we touch is now collecting this information the opportunity for working with “big data” is vast. ‘Just the way the Internet changed us in 20 or 30 years, big data will change how we live, work and play over the next 30 years,’ said Saman Haqqi, program director of big data marketing at IBM (formerly Vivisimo). The possibilities she said can’t be understated since already it touches everything from better weather forecasting to genomics research.”
This is interesting news, but there could be a potential complication with IBM and their big data powerhouse Watson. We wonder if this is a sign that IBM is moving on and focusing on the less flashy, but more practical business intelligence solutions for enterprise organizations, medical industries and others. We would not be too surprised if the super analytic brain slowly faded into the background.
Patrick Roland, March 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Doubts About Big Data
March 13, 2013
More skepticism is in the air over big-data hype. ReadWrite’s Matt Asay cites a recent dustup between a New York Times reporter and Tesla Motors‘ head honcho Elon Musk in, “Tesla and the Fallacy of Data-Driven Decisions.” Reporter John Broder had given the Tesla Model S a scathing review, with which Musk took issue. In the end, both parties effectively supported their arguments using Broder’s test-drive data. Who was right? Even after looking at that data, it is hard to say; and that is the problem.
Asay asserts that the value of big data lies in pointing us in the right direction, not in employing it to prove points and draw conclusions. He writes:
“New York Times columnist David Brooks nails this in an op-ed piece, wherein he argues that Big Data, while very useful for guiding our intuitions, gets some things very wrong. Like the value of social connections. Or the context for answering a question. In fact, he speculates, Big Data might actually obscure Big Answers by complicating decisions and making it even harder to determine which statistically significant correlations between data are informative and not simply spurious.”
The new big-data industry made for a $4.5 billion market in 2010, but is projected to hit $23.8 billion in 2016. Is all this growth just a house of cards?
Not necessarily, but it is important to recognize what data can and cannot do. Analysis software can find patterns and draw preliminary conclusions, but human minds are still better at higher-order thinking. (And I hope they always will be.)
Cynthia Murrell, March 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Hadoop Attempts to Secure Big Data
March 8, 2013
Hadoop creates lots of headlines with its open source framework that can handle data-intensive distributed applications. Many recent headlines have focused on the fact that by adding Hadoop to their framework, many solutions can improve their security. TechCrunch addresses the issue in its article, “Intel Launches Hadoop Distribution And Project Rhino, An Effort To Bring Better Security To Big Data.”
The article begins:
“Intel has launched its own Hadoop distribution, entering an already crowded market of major players all looking to get a piece of the big data pie. The company also announced an open-source effort to enhance security in Hadoop. Earlier this week, EMC and HP each announced its own Hadoop distribution. But for Intel, the challenge is to fortify its market-leading position in the data center, where it will face increasing challenge from an emerging ARM ecosystem.”
While Big Data is in many ways a new issue and is therefore demanding new technology, security does not have to be an issue at every turn. For instance, there are solutions built by industry-leading companies that have a strong record of security as well as support and training. LucidWorks is one of them and is definitely worth a second look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Big Data Does A Lot Yet Not Everything
March 8, 2013
Big data is a wonder tool that is supposed to improve how organizations use their information and advertently make everything better. GCN took a look at “Four Ways Big Data Can Save Lives And Money.” The article breaks down a Tech American Foundation survey “Big Data And the Public Sector.” Across the board the study claims that big data is providing the veritable magic data wand people have been wishing for:
“Both federal and state IT officials believe big data analytics can have real and immediate impacts on how governments operate, from helping to predict crime to cutting waste and fraud, according to the survey of nearly 200 public sector IT professionals commissioned by SAP AG, and conducted by pollsters Penn Schoen and Berland.”
Big data has been deployed by NASA for airline safety, Homeland Security for its bio-preparedness collective, the National Weather Service for weather patterns, and police departments to prevent crime. The analytics offer new and valuable insights. Saving lives has been tacked as the number one reason big data is useful; it helps medical researchers aggregate data. Crime prevention, improving life quality from fixing potholes to repairing social/welfare programs, and saving money were other ways that big data is helpful.
Big data can do wonders for information, but it is not a magic wand that can be waved and POOF the world is magically fixed. Big data provides the insights, people do the rest.
Whitney Grace, March 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Hortonworks Brings Big Data to Microsoft
March 7, 2013
Open source and Microsoft are fairly strange bedfellows. It is not often that readers would find the two mentioned in the same headline. However, what is a common headline these days is Big Data. For readers looking for headlines surrounding that term, there is no shortage. All of the themes above come together in one of the latest CMS Wire stories, “Hortonworks Brings Open Source Big Data Hadoop Platform To Microsoft’s Windows.”
The article begins:
“Further evidence that big data is going mainstream is the announcement from Hortonworks that its Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows (HDPW) is available in beta, making it the first Apache Hadoop distribution that is available for both Windows and Linux . . . HDPW should be on general releases as early as the second quarter. Using it, Hortonworks continues its mission to extend Apache Hadoop to every corner of the enterprise. With this release, users will be able to capture any amount of data and share it in any format, scaled to any size.”
So open source is on the move and no one can stop it, leaving the proprietary giants to get out of the way or adopt. It seems that Microsoft has chosen the latter. But just because everyone is scrambling to offer an open source based Big Data solution, it does not mean that they are all created equal. Take LucidWorks for example. Their LucidWorks Big Data rests on the power of Lucene and Solr and builds on years of industry experience. Plus, it is backed up by industry-leading support and training.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 7, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Red Hat Ventures into Big Data Analytics
March 6, 2013
Red Hat is a well-known leader in open source technology, and has made a name for itself as one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel. Red Hat has once again made headlines as it ventures into the world of Big Data and its newest trend, analytics. Datacenter Dynamics covers the story in their article, “Red Hat Brings Open-source to Big Data Analytics for Enterprises.”
“Red Hat announced its big data direction and solutions earlier this week, aiming at enterprise requirements for scalable and reliable infrastructure to run analytics workloads. The company also announced it would contribute the Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the ApacheTM Hadoop open-source community to turn Red Hat Storage into a Hadoop-compatible file system for big data requirements.”
Analytics may be a new buzzword, in the same way Big Data made the rounds last year. However, the fundamentals are still true. Enterprises need a way to give massive amounts of unstructured data some meaning, and many developers and companies are throwing their hat in that ring. LucidWorks is a leader that has been around for a long time, responding to the shifts in the market with open source solutions. Check out their LucidWorks Big Data for another alternative.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 6, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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