Big Data Continues to Draw Investors
November 16, 2012
Big Data is big news these days, and it is increasingly big business. Several Big Data companies, especially those who are founded on open source technologies, are raising considerable amounts of capital. Elasticsearch appears to join their ranks. Read the full report in the TechCrunch article, “Big Data Search And Analytics Startup Elasticsearch Raises $10M From Benchmark.”
The article states:
Elasticsearch, a real-time big data search and analytics startup,has raised $10 million in Series A financing led by Benchmark Capital. The other investors in the round include Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring and co-founder of SpringSource, and Data Collective . . . The company will use this funding to expand into new geographic regions and for further product development.
Open source is a good investment, and Big Data is definitely on the rise. However, Elasticsearch has yet to be proven in the industry. The article quotes 1.5 million downloads since 2009, but we received a piece just last week that leads us to believe the numbers may be inflated. “Are Elasticsearch Commits Lopsided?” discusses the questionable counting of downloads, but also the number of actual committers to the open source project. LucidWorks is an industry standard in open source search, so its natural extension into Big Data technology is a good fit and a trusted alternative to Elasticsearch.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 16, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Architect Roles Shifting in Big Data Developments
November 15, 2012
IBM PureSystems is developing new systems to deal with Big Data challenges and emphasizes high-performance data services for local and/or cloud storage. The systems facilitate more rapid implementation and full integration, according to the article “IBM PureSystems Takes on Big Data” on ComputerWorld, and are challenging the traditional role of enterprise architects.
The article informs us about the changes:
“The traditional job of an enterprise architect is ‘to produce a huge document saying ‘this is how we do it’ – a document that everyone ignores, because it takes more effort to read and follow it than it does to ignore it,’ says IBM ‘distinguished engineer’ Jason McGee.
‘With PureSystems kind of technology, you can turn the document into actionable patterns that live in the system. That shifts the inertia and makes it easier to do things the right way. Enterprise architects will think ‘at last I can influence the way things develop’.’”
IBM Pure’s attack on Big Data is obviously shifting the enterprise architect’s job to a new phase of expertise. Working with selected certified integrators such as Intrafind can make that shift an easier transition that manages data effectively with rich tagging and secure search.
Andrea Hayden, November 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Disruptive Software Solutions Aim to Increase Productivity
November 15, 2012
Ben Werther became head of the products division when EMC bought Greenplum in 2010, which Forbes asserts as the first step in founding Platfora. This company plans on disrupting the traditional warehousing and business intelligence and is the subject of the recent article, “Platfora Raises $20 Million To Get Real with Big Data.” The main collateral Platfora has is it’s usage of Hadoop.
Platfora is still in the early phases; there are ten beta customers and more than 70 that are waiting.
The article describes how Platfora increases the value of Hadoop:
Hadoop is not easy to work with. Keep in mind that it’s been mostly the domain of data scientists at companies like Yahoo! and Facebook. But with Platfora, it’s now possible for any company to get tangible business value from Big Data. This is through common sense queries and helpful visualizations. Pulling this off has taken about a year and intense engineering. ‘I’ve never seen better execution from a team,’ said Scott Weiss, who is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
There are a multitude of companies that have presented the business intelligence market with potentially disruptive technologies. PolySpot software solutions fit that bill, but more importantly they help deliver information across the enterprise. Increasing productivity is why these technologies matter after all.
Megan Feil, November 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Big Data Enters the Political Arena
November 15, 2012
Big Data is making headlines as it helps organization and companies make sense out of massive amounts of unstructured data. Interest heightens when companies can take Big Data and make profits. However, Big Data now has another potential arena for success – politics. Attivio has ventured into the election 2012 data. Read a full report in the MarketWatch article, “Attivio and Tableau Analyze Presidential Election News, Social Media and Polling Data.”
The author explains:
“‘As a Tableau partner in the Big Data space, Attivio has taken the election data to a new level with their ability to unify social media, unstructured content and structured data,’ said Ellie Fields, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Tableau. ‘Together, Attivio and Tableau provide a fully integrated and correlated visualization of unstructured content, structured data and business intelligence giving customers easily digestible, sharable and actionable insight.’”
Users who may be interested in tapping into Big Data for their own organizations could look to a trusted company like LucidWorks. Their LucidWorks Big Data has a major advantage in that it is ready out-of-the-box. Read more from the LucidWorks Web site.
“Designed to be ready out of the box, the LucidWorks Big Data platform includes all of the necessary open source components pre-integrated and certified. Within a few hours, a customer instance is provisioned and hosted in the cloud – and supported by LucidWorks.”
Big Data will continue to make a bigger and bigger impact in the enterprise. See what a Big Data solution can do for your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Retail Giants Make Transition to Big Data Analytics
November 14, 2012
I came across an interesting article on InformationWeek titled “Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop,” which tells about how some “old-school” companies are making the transition to big data services to access their customer bases. Sears’ admits personalization and customer loyalty were big draws to implementing big data analytics. To go beyond just the surface of available data, the retail giant turned to Hadoop.
The article tells us about the company’s choice of platforms and the benefits of the transition:
“Enter Hadoop, an open source data processing platform gaining adoption on the strength of two promises: ultra-high scalability and low cost compared with conventional relational databases. Hadoop systems at 200 terabytes cost about one-third of 200-TB relational platforms, and the differential grows as scale increases into the petabytes, according to Sears. With Hadoop’s massively parallel processing power, Sears sees little more than one minute’s difference between processing 100 million records and 2 billion records.”
This emerging drive toward IT services shows the basic needs of the enterprise and the reliance upon open source technology as businesses shift to big data services. The article admits there are issues with Hadoop: it is an immature platform and there is a lack of talent and experts in the program. Open source is a viable option for building solutions and experts are needed; enterprise search solution Intrafind does this well.
Andrea Hayden, November 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Agile Solutions for Big Data Make Exabytes Less Overwhelming
November 14, 2012
Many narratives follow the phrase big data and ZDNet discusses the story that EMC tells about big data. Katharin Winkler, vice president of corporate sustainability for EMC, explained the elusive concept in layman’s terms at the Verge @ Greenbuild summit. The main reason that this concept needs to be brought down to a lower level is because big data is affecting everyone’s lives. It has effectively “escaped the data center.”
Back in 2000, two exabytes of new information were created in the world. In 2011, Winkler said the world was creating data at a rate of more than two exabytes of new information everyday.
In the article, “EMC Explains Making Big Data More Concrete to General Public” we learned about EMC’s strategy:
Winkler briefly outlined EMC’s overall strategy, dubbed “The Human Face of Big Data,” which is designed make big data more comprehensible for everyday Internet users. That strategy includes a book of the same name being published later this month, which features images from more than 150 photojournalists worldwide, demonstrating that basically every moment of our lives can now be chronicled in the cloud.
The possibilities with big data may seem overwhelming at times. Inherently, the opportunities are endless. However, these insights and information can only be delivered to decision-makers with the proper infrastructure technologies in place. We have had our eyes on PolySpot for their agile solutions in this department.
Megan Feil, November 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Information Delivery Experts Tackle Big Data Beast
November 13, 2012
Connecting the dots of big data can become an arduous or easy task for a company depending on the software and consulting expertise they select. Luckily, every software company is discussing the subject and their technologies as these solutions relate to it. A recent post from enterprise software vendor Chilliad explains how to extract meaning from big data using their software in “Big Data or Big Noise.”
The Iterative Discovery process is utilized and it starts with the user interface and continues through the flexible workflow. Scalability is another hallmark of Chilliad’s software.
The article describes the motivation behind the technology:
Our experience in dealing with Big Data is we don’t know what we are looking for; we don’t know where to find it and we don’t want to have to figure that out. In fact, reading is not the next thing I want to do, reading is the last thing I want to do. That is why we approach Big Data as an exploration and provide software that supports an approach we call Iterative Discovery. Iterative Discovery is exactly what it sounds like — I start with a hunch or hypothesis that I wish to validate and that requires exploration and iteration through massive amounts of data.
Chilliad is making a solid effort in the big data sphere and we expect to see even more vendors offer up technologies in the way of tackling this beast. Additionally, others such as PolySpot have been making waves in this area for quite some time now as information delivery experts.
Megan Feil, November 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
IBM Does Big Data With Vivisimo
November 13, 2012
Computer World recently reported on IBM’s release of a number of new add ons and services designed to expand data sets more quickly, in the article, “IBM Refreshes Analysis Offerings.”
According to the article, these releases are aimed to help enterprises address their big data challenges. Unlike some other companies. IBM’s goal is to consolidate all information management systems into a single architecture in order to share data across systems.
When explaining other additions, the article states:
“IBM’s in-house Hadoop distribution, called IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, has been augmented with new capabilities as well. IBM has generated new report templates, ones that can conduct sentiment analysis on data from social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter.
BigInsights now includes the federated search capability from the Vivisimo search engine, which IBM acquired in April. Using the Vivisimo interface, now called InfoSphere Data Explorer, users can execute a single search across multiple data repositories, including both structured and unstructured data.”
It is nice to see that IBM is hopping on the big data bandwagon. But whatever happened to Watson?
Jasmine Ashton, November 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Inxight Moving to EC Wise
November 13, 2012
If true, this is an interesting development. The site Dvd to Ipad Converter Reviews announces the acquisition of data-management-developer resource Inxight Software by enterprise software company EC Wise in “BO M & Inxight Software.” The headline’s a little confusing; whither “business objects” in text mining we wonder?
The brief write up states:
“EC Wise said the company plans to Inxight’s unstructured information that companies added to the EC Wise business intelligence products to help customers take full advantage of all the data to make the right decisions. . . . EC Wise said, Inxight’s text analytics, federated search and visualization applications, will become part of EC Wise XI platform.”
Unfortunately, we have zero information about the value of this deal, which is expected to be completed in July.
The piece also gives us this observation:
“The acquisition reflects the consolidation trend in the software industry. Last Tuesday, the German software company AG said the United States have been given approval to $ 546,000,000 of its acquisition of webMethods.(AG is a building SOA-based software vendor), last week, Microsoft also announced that six billion U.S. dollars acquisition of online advertising company aQuantive.Earlier this month, Oracle acquired the company to 495 million Agile Software Corporation.”
EC Wise U.S. is based in San Rafael, California, while EC Wise Sichuan makes its home in Chengdu, China. The company focuses on business intelligence, big data, business process optimization/ automation, and, interestingly, gaming and entertainment.
Inxight Software‘s impressive customer roster includes Morgan Stanley and Yahoo. It emerged in 1997 from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The company has changed hands a couple of times already, having been bought by Business Objects in 2007, which was in turn absorbed by SAP in 2008. Let’s hope the company finds a happy home at EC Wise.
Cynthia Murrell, November 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How Big Data May Save Lives
November 12, 2012
In the wake of American disasters, most recently Superstorm Sandy that struck the northeast, technology experts are trying to find ways to help victims and prevent future devastation. GigaOm covers a full story on the topic in, “Computing for Disasters: Saving Lives with Big Data.”
The author begins:
“On Nov. 7, GigaOM Pro and LucidWorks examine the opportunities for search and analysis in disaster recovery, along with issues such as the sources of big data and the ways the general population can both provide and consume data before, during and after a disaster . . . Register here to join GigaOM Pro and our sponsor LucidWorks for ‘Computing for disasters: saving lives with big data,’ a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012, at 10 a.m. PT.”
Big Data is already impacting our lives daily, but these experts feel that it may make an impact on disaster response in the following areas: security training, first responder deployment, tailoring technology to response teams, and how previous disaster data can inform and improve future response times.
LucidWorks has long been a leader in open source search technology, and is a growing leader in Big Data. It makes sense that the company would use their technology and influence to improve the lives of disaster victims both now and in the future.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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