Intel Trax Top Stories September 20 to September 27
October 1, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published a series of articles that explained the importance of integrating analytics solutions to increase performance efficiency within the workplace.
Big data can be quite confusing. That is why it is always great to listen to the opinions of experts in the field. “John Whittaker on the Need for Data Integration for Big Data Analytics” explains why successful big data analytics requires integrating data from a multitude of sources.
When explaining why big data integration is necessary, Whittaker said:
“One of the big aspects that people are trying to get a handle right now, and one of our major uses, is big data analytics. Once you get beyond the Google or Facebook use cases and start talking about how the rest of us will use big data, it is going to be analytics. Whenever you’re doing analytics, you want to marry information from different sources. You might want to be able to correlate what’s happening within your ERP and the operational data that might exist there, with experiential data from your website. The operational data often tends to reside in relational databases, but when you’re talking about experiential data, about how people are utilizing your website or what people are saying on social media about you, that sort of data resides within the unstructured big data world of Hadoop. It’s really about being able to marry these sources together into one environment and drive better decisions based on the information there is the primary value that the big data environment is going to provide for the normal enterprise.”
Along with integrating big data, many experts are also making predictions regarding the future of big data. “Predicting the Next Big Thing in Big Data” talks about some of the new up in comes in the industry that may make a big impact.
When explaining a new report that has come out, the article states:
“Big Data – The Next Big Thing”, a first-of-its-kind report on the ‘Big Data’ industry, focusing on the opportunities, challenges, and its impact on businesses globally. ‘Big Data’ relates to rapidly growing, structured and unstructured datasets with sizes beyond the ability of conventional database tools to store, manage, and analyze them.
The report identifies five key insights on global ‘Big Data’ trends and the opportunity it throws up for IT and analytics players in India. First, Big Data has become all-pervasive with the potential to create significant benefits for a number of sectors. The early adopters driving the business with appetite for Big Data analytics are industries such as Manufacturing, Retail, Financial Services, Telecom and Healthcare.”
In “Marketing Analytics Industry Expected to See Dramatic in India” references a report that shows companies are increasingly using marketing analytics technology as a way to stay ahead of their competition. This is particularly relevant in India because the marketing analytics industry is expected to grow from $200 million to $1.2 billion by 2012.
The report explains:
“Over the past few decades, the evolution in traditional media and the emergence of digital media has revolutionized the way products are sold to the customers. Marketing analytics play a pivotal role in helping marketers take informed data-driven decisions and effectively reach out to the audience. The marketing analytics industry is poised for exponential growth and India will be one of the foremost forces leading this revolution. This report is an effort to showcase potential of analytics to organizations, analytics players and prospective employees and will help pave the way for concerted effort to increase the usage.”
While these articles may discuss different aspect of big data, they all have one thing in common. They all call for a need for companies to invest in solutions that evolve with the times. Digital Reasoning is a big data analytics company that works within nearly every business sector to promote automated understanding over human effort.
Jasmine Ashton, October 1, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT, developer of Augmentext.
In the Future Marketing May Be Responsible for IT
September 30, 2012
The general consensus is that IT jobs are booming and it is a profitable field to specialize in, but according to ZDNet in the article, “Research: The Devalued Future of IT in a Marketing World.” You really need to see the data visuals to understand what the article is discussing, but basically the models show a startling decrease in IT budgets circa 2009 but the growth has picked up in recent years. IT departments have been strapped, using more with less and are seen as a tool to increase productivity and efficiency. They are no longer the default go to place for new ideas and innovation in businesses.
Marketing appears to be where the money is headed and they want to create their own technology achievements, but there are always ways to counter these starting trends. If you are a CIO, you can take measures to ensure your IT department has a good working relationship with marketing. The article offers some tips to establish a relationship with the marketing department.
Most of the tips are general knowledge, but this one makes the most sense:
“Execute with excellence: deliver your projects on time and within budget. When IT fails to deliver the basics, it loses credibility and undermines attempts to raise the bar in other areas. Make sure that IT supplies basic infrastructure, security, and reliability without a lot of fanfare. At the most basic level, IT should disappear because things just work.”
But IT should not disappear within the company. It needs to establish itself as a valuable commodity. If your company is searching for extra profit, initiate a big data plan. Try handing that over to marketing.
Whitney Grace, September 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Communicating the Value of Big Data
September 28, 2012
The IT world has successfully communicated the message that Big Data is valuable. It has been less successful in explaining how, exactly. Following its recent BI & Analytics Perspectives Conference, Computerworld realizes that “Finding the Business Value in Big Data is a Big Problem.” The IT pros gathered at the conference seem to agree that the current problem with the data analytics phenomenon is figuring out just what to do with all that information. The article explains:
“Technology vendors and industry analysts tout the enormous business benefits that enterprises can gain from mashing up traditional structured data with unstructured data from the cloud, mobile devices, social media channels and other sources. But business executives have little idea of how to take advantage of Big Data or how to articulate their requirements to IT, according to several executives at the show.
“Business leaders often ‘don’t know what they don’t know,’ said one frustrated IT manager, and therefore they are incapable of explaining to IT shops what to do with all this data that’s being accumulated.”
A similar problem crops up with most new technologies. People have to break out of decades-old thought patterns to even see the possibilities—an overwhelming task for most humans. Some companies are creating “innovation labs” with the sole purpose of getting the best ROI from their Big Data investments.
That’s probably a good thing, but I think vendors must take responsibility for explaining the value in their products. Collecting and peering at data is only valuable as a means to some profitable end. Those who supply Big Data solutions must find ways to illustrate the worth of their products with clear examples, suggestions, and starting points for potential clients. If they cannot, their businesses may not outlast what could become known as the Big Data Fad of the early 21st Century.
Cynthia Murrell, September 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
LucidWorks Growth Focuses on the User Experience and Search Features
September 27, 2012
We recently commented on the Forbes’ article titled, “LucidWorks: Bringing Search to Big Data” and the rising usage of Lucene/Solr technology across dominating companies such as Netflix, AT&T, and Twitter. The same article also brings to light the fact that the world of data is shifting from mainly numbers to one that is essentially text-based, thanks to outlets such as social networking.
This is where LucidWorks enters. The company is aware that the Web search box is the key to helping any and all users find the information they are looking for, even if they are inept at programming language. This transition will be bringing Big Data to a larger audience with easy-to-use search features. LucidWorks knows search technology is where Big Data needs to focus and the company plans on becoming the leader for this enterprise. Strides in this direction were made in May with the launch of a big data beta project, LucidWorks Big Data, which certifies and integrates Apache open source components to develop and manage big data applications.
We learn about the company’s plan and focus on user-experience in the article:
“‘Users are missing from the big data conversation,’ argues [Grant Ingersoll, Chief Scientist for LucidWorks.] Paying attention to what users are doing helps improve the real-time, ad-hoc access to the data by improving relevance and search results. The analysis of users’ interaction with the system could also provide, as an interesting by-product, new insights about the business. In other words, what your employees do with your data may tell you a whole lot about how your business is functioning and even where it’s heading.’”
Created in 2008 as Lucid Imagination, the team is adept at managing and developing in the ever-shifting enterprise search marketplace. Changing the company’s business model to become innovators in the open source technology realm and now tackling the global emphasis on Big Data, the developers are aware of what needs to be done to fully contribute and make an impact in the expanding market. With a commitment to innovation and user-experience, we agree with Forbes about the future of LucidWorks:
“LucidWorks may represent a new wave of change, using search—the first ‘killer app’ of the Web—to unlock the value of enterprises’ much expanded big data stores and overflowing organizational memories.”
We are anxious to watch the company continue to grow and become leaders in search, content processing, and Big Data analytics.
Andrea Hayden, September 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Upcoming Discussion on Big Data and HealthCare
September 26, 2012
GigaOM recently reported on an upcoming round table discussion between several experts in the field of big data analytics in the article, “Using Big Data to Reinvent Health Care.”
According to the article, the panel of experts GigaOM Analyst Jody Ranck and LexisNexis HPCC Systems Data Scientist Joe Prichard will use real world examples to address how big data services are being used in early detection of diseases as well as how to detect fraud through big data software.
When providing some background on the topic, the article states:
“Today’s health care system is challenged in managing data and costs. From the rise of an aging population to the increase of fraud, waste and abuse, health care organizations are challenged to efficiently maximize their resources for legitimate patients who need care. New health care legislation brings challenges and opportunities for health care organizations and their patients. With health care costs projected to spiral into the trillions of dollars in the next few years, many organizations are applying the advances in IT, mobile and other forms of technology to the problem of containing costs and finding new and innovative ways to care for patients.”
Big data reinventing health care is a remarkable claim. This should be an interesting discussion to keep tabs on.
Jasmine Ashton, September 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Centrifuge Releases Latest Version of Visual Networks Analytics Platform
September 24, 2012
Centrifuge recently published “Centrifuge Delivers Scalable Big Data Analytics With Visual Networks Analytics Version 2.7” which discusses a new solution that minimizes the need for data scientists while accelerating discovery across disparate data points. Sounds pretty cool…and complicated.
According to the news release, Centrifuge, a provider of Big Data analytics and visualization solutions for fraud, security and risk, announced the availability of the latest version of its Visual Networks Analytics platform. It addresses the need to derive context intelligence and pattern discovery in big data by delivering powerful technology that addresses the growing need to quickly filter, sift and understand large amounts of data.
Renee Lorton, Centrifuge CEO, explains:
“Corporate Information security is a big data analytics challenge that cannot be addressed with traditional data mining, BI, or legacy analytics approaches. The sheer volume and complexity requires a powerful investigative discovery approach that is easy enough for a non-data scientist to use. Machine data, for example, is one of the fastest growing segments of big data, generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and other sources. Now, discovering patterns in Big Data is both easy and cost effective with Centrifuge’s powerful interactive data visualization.”
With an increasing number of organizations being hacked, information security is becoming a higher priority. A variety of industries would benefit from this technology.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories: September 14 to September 20
September 24, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence systems blog delivered some interesting stories that are especially pertinent to those looking to solve the big data problem with analytics solutions.
One field that could see a great deal of benefits from data analytics is education. “The Future of Education Lies with Data Analytics” foresees an education system that is taught through computerized software programs that collect data on the length of time it takes students to master material. Unlike teachers who have limited time and availability, this software would provide instant feedback and compare students to classmates as well as other students across the country.
When discussing the value of this new system, the article states:
“In comparing these two learning environments, it is apparent that current school evaluations suffer from several limitations. Many of the typical pedagogies provide little immediate feedback to students, require teachers to spend hours grading routine assignments, aren’t very proactive about showing students how to improve comprehension, and fail to take advantage of digital resources that can improve the learning process. This is unfortunate because data-driven approaches make it possible to study learning in real-time and offer systematic feedback to students and teachers.”
In the field of data analytics, new and innovative partnerships are always coming about. “Tivo and Scripps Sign Deal to Improve Audience Analytics” announces a deal made between Tivo Research and Analytics and Scripps Networks Interactive, allowing Scripps to access TRA’s audience insights and analytics.
Here’s how it works:
“Media TRAnalytics® TV Auto Ratings launched in January 2012 and enables networks and advertisers to identify the right TV programming based on the make and model of automobile purchases by households watching specific networks and programs. By matching households of television tuning and automotive registration data from Experian Automotive’s North American Vehicle Database (NVDB), TRA provides advertisers, advertising agencies and television networks the industry’s largest household-level single-source solution to plan, buy, sell and evaluate the automotive industry’s current investment in television advertising.”
Big data analytics tools allow for companies to be able to gain valuable insights from your credit card statements, web searches, and social media activity. “Social Media Allows for Personal Analytics as Marketing Tools” explains how businesses can harness the data being put out of social media platforms like Facebook in order to gain insights in order to predict buying behavior.
When explaining the service, the article states:
“It also provides an interesting insight into the kind of machinations that Facebook itself could easily be doing with the data in house. Line this up with the output of Facebook’s own data export tool and you get a good picture for the truth of how much data is being collated. Consider combining patterns across tens or hundreds of millions of profiles with this level of detail and you start to get a picture of the power of the platform.”
Being able to uncover marketing trends and insights about customer behavior is becoming integral to the success of companies in nearly every field and industry. For those looking for an affordable solution that promotes automated understanding of big data analytics, consider Digital Reasoning’s flagship solution Synthesys.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Analyzing Big Data in DNA to Find Diseases
September 20, 2012
Mass amounts of raw data cause problems for more fields than just computer science. Life scientists struggle to wade through the amounts of data surrounding sequencing human genes and genetic characteristics. However, according to “Computational Method for Pinpointing Genetic Factors That Cause Disease” on Science Daily, Researchers are Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Center for Human Genome Variation at Duke University Medical Center have developed an approach for analyzing this data to quickly cull out relevant genetic patterns and find variants that lead to particular disorders.
The study is outlined in the September issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics. We learn:
“[Zhu, the paper’s first author, notes,] ‘We’re confident that our method can be applied to genome-wide association studies related to diseases for which there are no known causal variants, and by extension may advance the development of targeted approaches to treating those diseases.’
‘This approach helps to intergrade the large body of data available in GWASs with the rapidly accumulating sequence data,’ adds David B. Goldstein, […]Director of the Center for Human Genome Variation at DUMC and senior author of the paper.’”
The technological advancement allowing scientists to pinpoint such causal variants is fascinating. However, as this technology advances, we are left to wonder how insurers will begin to use these predictive methods. Could faulty genes be analyzed in the future to justify declining policies?
Andrea Hayden, September 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Centrifuge Video Worth a Look
September 18, 2012
Centrifuge Systems has a metaphorical-type video explaining its system and method, lengthily titled: “Uncover the Mysteries in Big Data and Fraud Data Analysis with Centrifuge Systems.” The overview runs 1.24 minutes and is worth a look. If you like that one, check out more instructive videos at the company’s resource page. These folks are good at explaining things.
Centrifuge recently released version 2.7 of its analysis software. About their technology, the site explains:
“Centrifuge Visual Network Analytics gives you the power and flexibility to connect, visualize and collaborate without complex data integration, costly services or a data science degree. Using advanced link analysis, you can ‘bring your own data’ from any source, filter and combine as desired, and quickly make connections between people, behavior and events.
“Centrifuge Interactive Visualizations move beyond simple visual dashboards to give you the ability to interpret data within the context of your business. With patent-pending Collaborative Discovery, you can share findings and collaborate with others for deeper insights and faster problem-solving.”
Centrifuge is proud to have garnered a place in the 2012 FinTech Innovation Lab Program, and to have been placed on the 2012 Always On Global 250 Private Company Top Ones to Watch list. The company is Headquartered in McLean, VA.
Cynthia Murrell, September 18, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories: September 7 to September 13
September 17, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published articles on current trends related to big data, fraud detection, and analytics solutions that will help both of the previously stated problems.
“Real Time Analytics Makes an Impact” discusses how companies have spent the last couple of years making it so that their analytics solutions have zero lag time.
The article states:
“Operational Intelligence, basically, is real-time analytics over operational and social data. Operational intelligence, or OI as we like to call it, provides three important capabilities. First is real-time visibility over a wide variety of data. Second is real-time insight using real-time continuous analytics, and third is what we call right-time action, which means being able to take action in time to make a measurable difference in the business. We decided to focus on Operational Intelligence because it addresses some very important business problems that we felt were not well served by traditional software products today. These problems include service assurance in telco, social analytics for dynamic selling and brand management, real-time supply chain management, smart grid management in electrical utilities, and dynamic pricing in retail. These are just some of the examples.”
One way that analytics solutions have positively impacted a variety of industries is through the detection of fraud. “Fraud Analytics Deliver on Fine Art Forgeries” explains a new niche in fraud analytics that helps prevent substantial losses from individuals and museums.
The article informs:
“Just as with credit card fraud detection, the data sets created by digital authentication are quite large. Similarly, the modeling tools are extremely sophisticated, looking for patterns that would be unlikely from the painter just as a given purchase would be unlikely for a credit card holder. Zeroing in on the fraud can save an enterprise millions of dollars. Digital authentication is not real-time — it took two days to identify the fake Van Gogh. But in the world of art, that’s more than fast enough.”
When discussing advancements made in the industry, the information is often more well received when it comes from experts in the field. “Analytic News is Best From the Experts” showcases on experts opinion on the topic:
“Werner Vogels, a data guru as chief technology officer for Amazon Web Services, has been touting his interpretation of big data for almost two years. For him, managing a behemoth like Amazon, it’s not exactly what big data is, but what can be done with it.
“Big data is the collection and analysis of large amounts of data to create a competitive advantage,” he told a conference earlier this year.
“I am an infrastructure guy and for me big data is when your data sets become so large that you have to start innovating how to collect, store, organise, analyse and share it.”
Since technology is continuing to progress at rapid rates it is important the companies seek out a data analytics provider that evolves with the times. Digital Reasoning’s solutions, not only will protect your business from fraud, but its automated understanding for Big Data allows companies to find the necessary information they need to stay ahead of the competition.
Jasmine Ashton, September 17, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
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