How to Gain the Maximum Value Out of Big Data
February 5, 2013
From the Harvard Business Review comes an article that outlines the results of an interesting survey conducted by NewVantage Partners on how businesses plan to achieve value from big data and the technological solutions that tap into it. In the article, “Getting the Maximum Value Out of Your Big Data Initiative both statistics from the study are shared in addition to next steps for organizations looking to employ big data.
As many as 85% of participating companies answered that that either have big data initiatives in the works or currently underway in order to improve business practices and increase efficiency.
The article states:
In order to achieve this goal, many of the firms interviewed have established a new business metric for measuring the value of their Big Data initiatives — Time-to-Answer (TTA). TTA reflects the speed by which executives can answer critical business questions and has become a common measure on Wall Street and among other leading firms. The Pentagon has established an equivalent metric known as Data-to-Decision, which is dramatized in the analyses conducted by the intelligence community in the Academy Award–nominated film Zero Dark Thirty.
These organizations developing metrics for evaluating ROI such as TTA are a few steps ahead of others. These such organizations were most likely the early adopters of key technology components such as PolySpot. Their solutions enable connectivity between data across the enterprise.
Megan Feil, February 5, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Possibilities for ROI Loom Large for Organizations Using PolySpot
February 4, 2013
While the term big data has been around for quite some time now as a commonly used phrase, there are still some media sources exploring the story and lineage behind the term used today. The New York Times‘ recent article “The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story” delves into the subject, but first presents a staggering fact.
The Library of Congress announced last month that their directory of public tweets had reached 170 billion and this number is only rising. Because of a deal between Twitter and the Library, these tweets are not yet available for researchers to use, but this shows how connected both people and businesses are to big data.
From economists to John Mashey, the author explores possibilities of who should be credited with the origin of big data:
In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics was the giant of computer graphics, used for special-effects in Hollywood and for video surveillance by spy agencies. It was a hot company in the Valley that dealt with new kinds of data, and lots of it. There are no academic papers to support the attribution to Mr. Mashey. Instead, he gave hundreds of talks to small groups in the middle and late 1990s to explain the concept and, of course, pitch Silicon Graphics products.
While the story of big data’s origin is an interesting one, what is more exciting to businesses today are the possibilities for ROI. Technologies such as PolySpot that are designed to increase productivity and efficiency in the workplace are helping organizations achieve competitive advantage.
Megan Feil, February 4, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
DataStax Brings Enterprise Security to NoSQL
February 4, 2013
The next generation of the DataStax data management platform will be made available at the end of February. DataStax Enterprise 3.0 attempts to tie the flexibility of NoSQL databases to the security features enterprises have come to expect. Kristen Bent covers all the details for CRN in her story, “DataStax Merges Enterprise Security, NoSQL In Big Data Platform.”
The new platform is described:
“The new platform, dubbed DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 3.0, is targeted at organizations looking to adopt NoSQL databases — a type of next-generation, non-relational database optimized for big data — without sacrificing the robust security features native to more traditional SQL databases, explained Robin Schumacher, vice president of products at DataStax.“
While DataStax Enterprise 3.0 may be the latest in security technology for NoSQL-based solutions, some would still say that it is not quite as secure as more traditional options. Apache Lucene and Solr are the standards in the world of enterprise search, and provide a stable and predictable environment upon which to build. Industry trusted solutions like LucidWorks, which utilize the power of Lucene and Solr, might be a less risky solution for security in the enterprise.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 4, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
PolySpot Utilizes Data from both Past and Present to Offer Insights
February 1, 2013
A very interesting article came out of Wired recently. This piece, “Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to Long Data,” asserts that perhaps living in real-time and considering only current snapshots may be a flawed method.
Analytics should look at both slow changes, throughout longer periods of time and fast changes happening in real-time. The author refers to slow changes as “long data.”
The article states:
By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep — taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.
This is an article in which the angle made the story. No one says big data and implies that the historical contexts and perspectives are not included within that terminology. Big data solutions such as PolySpot are utilizing data from across every sector of the enterprise, both past and present, in order to deliver effective information on the future.
Megan Feil, February 1, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
IT Spending Expected to Hit Nearly Four Trillion in 2014
February 1, 2013
Now here’s a crazy number. InfoWorld shares a recent prediction from two prominent research companies in, “Gartner: Big Data Will Help Drive IT Spending to $3.8 Trillion in 2014.” Gartner expects IT spending to reach $3.7 trillion this year.
Despite the headline, big data is just one of many factors to affect these figures. A world beginning to recover from economic uncertainty, says a Gartner VP, will help boost spending in 2013, as will purchases of printers and mobile phones. On the other hand, lower-priced tablets will help businesses save money.
I’m not sure why writer Ted Samson (or someone else at InfoWorld) chose to emphasize big data in its headline, other than to capitalize on a popular keyword. Here is the entirety of that technology’s mention in the article, within the paragraph on software:
“Enterprise software makers stand to see the significant gains from increased IT spending. Gartner expects a 6.4 percent increase in spending on software this year, up from $278 billion in 2012 to $296 billion in 2013. The figure will hit $316 billion in 2014, a 6.8 percent increase. The key markets for 2013 will include security, storage management and CRM. ‘However, beginning in 2014, markets aligned to big data and other information management initiatives, such as enterprise content management, data integration tools, and data-quality tools will begin to see increased levels of investment,’ according to Gartner.”
Okay, we get it — companies will be investing more in the management of large amounts of data. Among many other things. (Perhaps you can tell I’m a bit tired of the hype.)
The article also points to conclusions from another research company, Forrester. They also predict spending increases in enterprise software, driven mainly by SaaS and data-driven smart apps. They foresee increased work for IT services as a result of the cloud-storage trend and increased spending on data center systems. However, the global telecom services market remains top dog in the realm of IT-spending.
Cynthia Murrell, February 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Business Decisions No Longer Guess Work with PolySpot Solutions
January 31, 2013
In a naturally chaotic world, having a penchant for theorizing answers about the fundamental mysteries of the world and less serious daily issues has always aided people in successfully navigating the world around them and their companies or organizations. A recent article from Wired theorizes that big data may bring about the end of theory as we know it in a thought provoking article called, Big Data, Language and the Death of the Theorist.
People like Kalev Leetaru, who found clues pointing to Osama Bin Laden’s hiding location through publicly available data (after Laden’s death), predict that forecasting future events is possible and currently enabled.
The article discusses the intelligence aspect of big data analytics that is even applicable to language:
For scientists and mathematicians, working with supercomputers makes sense — their information is numerical. It already exists in a language that machines can read. The interesting thing here for historians and sociologists and literature critics, and everyone else who works with language and the vagaries of the human condition, is that we’ve reached a point where supercomputers are fast enough to crunch that data just as easily as anything else.
Both the inherent power of language associated with semantic enrichment in business intelligence solutions such as those from PolySpot and their library of connectors that enable enriched information access across the enterprise will aid organizations to make better decisions in real time. In the areas where the paradigm of the world changes, the same goes for business.
Megan Feil, January 31, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Data Quality and Delivery Ensured By Over One Hundred Connectors in Solution by PolySpot
January 30, 2013
Information Management discusses how businesses can be a part of “Revealing Big Data’s Secrets” for their own gain in this recent article. The article explains that too much has been covered in the media in regards to big data that discusses the what and why of the matter. How is the weak link in this inherently necessary triumvirate of information to help businesses in beginning deployment of big data technologies.
Businesses who have found out why they need big data and what it is are perfectly poised to gain competitive advantage from big data if they take the next steps to utilize the right technologies.
The article states:
Our research into operational intelligence found that the use of events is a critical part of the big data environment. At the same time the skills of master data management and data governance do not go away, and in fact become important to address the business accuracy question that inevitably pops up when more data becomes available to be utilized. Our research into product information management has found that the drive for data quality is changing organizations’ approaches.
Data quality and integrity is very important to businesses as they work to churn insights out of data. One solution we have seen from PolySpot offers more than one hundred connectors to ensure that data is delivered in the proper form.
Megan Feil, January 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Big Data Hailed as Triumphant
January 30, 2013
We’ve tripped over more big-data cheerleading, and we are ready to say, “enough already.” The timpark.io blog trumpets, “Data Trumps Everything.” Oh, really?
Mr. Park uses the example of the modern supermarket to illustrate his assertion: the use of big-data analysis has eclipsed human experience and intuition. While information technology was adopted to assist the seasoned manager with time-consuming calculations, the write-up asserts that big data has now taken over. Using grocery-receipt data, software now analyzes a myriad of factors, builds sophisticated models, and directs in-store humans in order to maximize profits. Park notes:
“That Halloween expansion of candy? That wasn’t a guess – the supermarket knows down to a matter of hours of when to roll that out. This is an obvious example, but a data scientist at one major retailer confided to me that they have over 550 such rotations that happen in a year to capture ebbs and flows in certain products. Some of these are obvious, like Halloween candy or Valentine’s Day cards, that any human manager could have predicted — perhaps not with the accuracy of the data driven approach — but close enough. But the vast majority of these are changes that frankly they don’t completely understand, like that having a sale on cereal on Tuesdays results in 17% more profit in breakfast products during 2 week periods where less than 4 sunny days are forecast.”
Park is correct that this is now our grocery-store reality. He is even correct to extrapolate that many other types of business are following suit. However, going on to say that data trumps “everything” is, shall we say, a bit simplistic. Even at large retail chains, humans take ultimate responsibility for decisions, including whether or not to follow the suggestions of that pricey software they chose to buy.
Now, if Watson ever takes over as CEO at IBM, that will be a different matter.
Cynthia Murrell, January 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data Solutions Put the Information to Work and Enable Insights to Spread Across the Enterprise
January 29, 2013
Both skill and will are needed for a project to come to fruition. Many organizations have determined that deploying technologies to add value to big data would be beneficial at this point in time. Now, they are looking around to find the workforce with the skill to truly glean all the opportunities and insights possible out of big data. Forbes discusses data scientists and the convoluted Hadoop framework in “Combating the Big Data Skills Shortage.”
The article explains that integrating Hadoop with other projects can prove cumbersome but that the IT community has helped to bridge the gaps:
In the most extreme case, it means that traditional Oracle or DB/2 based applications could essentially run on top Hadoop. In more realistic applications, it means that some traditional applications could be migrated to run on Hadoop, as new data sources are integrated with traditional structured databases. New queries could then be created to take advantage of the traditional and the new data sources together to provide new insight and value to the business.
While some frameworks like Hadoop are better geared towards data scientists and analysts that need years of experience trained in this specific technology, there are still other technologies like infrastructure components that have those skills built into them. A big data solution like PolySpot puts Information At Work to lessen the need for hiring data scientists immediately.
Megan Feil, January 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Disney And Its Big Data Plan Is Home Built
January 29, 2013
When most companies aim to take advantage of big data, usually they turn to a commercial company to set them up with a deployment plan and software. Disney, one of the world’s biggest companies, decided to build its own big data initiative in-house and with open source software. Gigaom has all of the details on the Mouse’s plans in the article, “How Disney Built A Big Data Platform On A Startup Budget.” When Arun Jacob, Disney’s director of data solutions, was told to build a big data platform, he knew he needed to make something that would be useful to the entire corporation.
Disney’s platform uses MongoDB, Hadoop, and Cassandra, but while Jacob tried to use as much open source software as possible he did tap into Disney’s large purse and buy commercial software. The project is moving along well, but Jacob had this to say:
“Still, after all the work he put into building Disney’s big data platform, it’s not exactly a process Jacob is hoping to repeat as the platform evolves. The tools for managing big data are getting better, he said, so he still does a build-versus-buy analysis when it’s time to make a change. Building custom tools is fine when you don’t have a choice, but it’s not always wise when buying something could save untold man-hours and headaches.”
Economy is good. Now why does Disney charge thousands for a mouse guide who takes well-heeled customers through the exits to skip the serpentine lines. Oh, to create money to do big data economically. M I C K E Y, see you real soon.
Whitney Grace, January 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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