Useful Resource Courtesy of Autonomy
July 4, 2012
Autonomy stars in its own slide show explaining big data, we learn in eWeek’s “Enterprise Applications: How Autonomy’s Private Cloud Tackles Big Data, Analytics.” The slide show is reproduced in the article, and it does a good job of breaking down the increasingly influential phenomenon, starting with the basics. For example, the introductory slide explains:
“Big data is comprised of structured data, which is data that fits cleanly into spreadsheets and databases, and unstructured data, which is human-generated information . . . . Unstructured ‘diverse data’ now makes up more than 90 percent of the world’s data, and it is the fastest-growing form of information. Just as importantly, this ‘human information’ is where the interesting things happen. This is where customers share their experiences with a brand and indicate their buying preferences. This is where teams of corporate lawyers look to find evidence of fraud and compliance violations.”
Clear and succinct—gotta love it. The slides contains some helpful graphics, too, and include comparisons to help wrap one’s head around the colossal numbers involved. It also talks up Autonomy’s big-data expertise, but that is to be expected. I would recommend it as a resource for explaining the matter to the uninitiated or confused.
Autonomy, founded in 1996 and now owned by HP, offers a full range of cloud-based solutions that use Autonomy’s IDOL to tame mind-boggling amounts of unstructured data. The technology grew from research originally performed at Cambridge University, and now serves prominent public and private organizations around the globe.
Cynthia Murrell, July 4, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
User Friendly Tools from Q-Sensei
June 29, 2012
Q-Sensei puts ease-of-use front and center with its latest announcement. Melodika.net reports, “Q-Sensei Announces First Set of Data Visualization Modules and Dashboard Page for Q-Sensei Enterprise.” The new tools help users get the most out of Q-Sensei Enterprise 2.0, a platform that pulls together data from a myriad of sources. The write up tells us:
“The visualization tools help end-users graphically understand and digest the unified data set. The dashboard page serves as a personalized portal of visual displays of user-relevant and user-defined data.”
“Graphs automatically provide dynamic ‘zooming’ for micro-level details on the data attributes straight from data points on the graphs. . . . Each user can select from a variety of visualization options to suit his/her needs — line, scatter or bar graphs on time-series analyses as well as quick-settings for one-, two- and three-year trending time frames.”
The story includes links to screenshots from the application: one showcasing the visualization tools and a shot of the dashboard.
Q-Sensei emphasizes multi-dimensional search, which it defines as combining full-text and dynamic faceted search with real-time content analysis. The award-winning company was created in 2007 with the merger of the German Lalisio and the American QUASM, and now has offices in both Brooklyn and Erfurt, Germany. Q-Sensei vows that its solutions make it easy to find what you need, even if you don’t have the proper keywords at your fingertips.
Cynthia Murrell, June 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Connotate and Digital Reasoning Glean Intelligence from Social Media
June 27, 2012
Governments are eager to rapidly cull actionable intelligence from the constant deluge of unstructured social media data. Digital Reasoning and Connotate have announced that they are teaming up to address this need with Connotate’s expertise in large-scale data monitoring and extraction and with Digital Reasoning’s unstructured data analytics chops. The press release states:
“Connotate’s ability to monitor dynamic social media sources, automatically reformat large-scale data into simple formats and deliver them to Digital Reasoning’s machine-learning text analytics solution helps government agencies and businesses achieve a deeper understanding of how they are perceived and connected to the world around them. Rather than analyzing all of the world’s data, this partnership instead focuses on leveraging only relevant, timely information so that government agencies can accurately link people and organizations to a myriad of related data points, including time and location. This capability is crucial to government agencies as well as enterprises conducting competitive intelligence or internal audits.”
Sounds like a capable combination. Connotate CEO Keith Cooper is excited about the unprecedented partnership, which combines technologies to take on what he says are the three main challenges of big data: velocity, variety, and volume. Tim Estes, CEO of Digital Reasoning, emphasizes that speed is the crucial factor in this particular project.
Digital Reasoning boasts that their Synthesys, used by over a dozen government agencies, is the first software platform that automatically makes sense of big data. The company was founded in 2007, and makes its primary home in Franklin Tennessee, with an office in Washington, DC.
Founded in 2000, Connotate aims to help clients increase the value they get out of Web-based data with easy-to-use solutions. Connotate asserts that it is the only vendor in its field “with a broad, uncontested patent portfolio.” That is a definite advantage. The company has been named a KMWorld “Trend-Setting Product” for the past six years.
Cynthia Murrell, June 27, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Sinequa Questions Big Data
June 27, 2012
Sinequa’s Business Search Blog recently reported on big data in the article “Big Data: Marketing Nirvana or the Next Big Bubble to Burst.”
According to the article, Big Data is a phrase that many organizations misuse in order to pump up their services. This is unfortunate for those companies that really do have something to offer to this burgeoning market.
The market the Sinequa is referring to is one where enterprises and administrators have to deal with vast amounts of unstructured data that come in a variety of formats and sources. Therefore, the market is created by companies that create products and services that extract the useful information from this large mess of data.
Sinequa then goes on to plug its solution by stating:
“At Sinequa, we have been dealing with Big Data (in the above sense) for quite some time: Our Unified Information Access solution has been used by large enterprises and administrations to plough through billions of data base records, business transactions, and unstructured data of all sorts, like documents, emails, and social network data. Our semantic analyses and Natural Language Processing have served to make sense of this magma of data, and to create structure where there was none. All this in order to find sense in chaos. The challenge for us was to combine deep analysis with high performance in dealing with big volumes.”
While Sinequa’s customers benefit from the fact that they have been creating Big Data solutions for quite some time, that doesn’t mean that that their solution is the only solution to structuring the unstructured data. The point is, however, a valid one.
Jasmine Ashton, June 27, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Cheers to Alternative Search with a Half Full Glass
June 26, 2012
Lift your glass and say “cheers” to alternative search and the routes they are taking to better inform consumers and businesses alike. The article, Beyond Google: Tap Into the Alternative Search Engine Data Opportunity gives us a look into what the alternate search engines are offering and why Google’s barrel is running a little dry.
eCommerce is opening doors for more defined search and:
“The search industry is moving beyond Google domination, and there’s a real value in that for publishers and retailers that recognize the data opportunity. I would argue that unique, first-party data has significantly more value to the marketer than say, has someone browsed a particular article on your digital magazine. These are not the types of insights Google can tell you.”
The article quenches the inquisitive thirst by offering five tips to help marketers capitalize on the alternative search opportunity utilizing retargeting:
- Use search data across a variety of search entities
- Set 90-day and 180-day data strategies
- Determine partners based on the value brought to data
- Reevaluate your priorities and strategy
- Accelerate beyond traditional search
Data is a constantly flowing fountain offering drinks to all and glasses stay half full. While Google claims to be the data search brewery, their selection process leaves many businesses staring at an empty bottom. Alternative search methods throw a private party with a custom brew and leave the bottle. Just imagine the potential if they expanded. Cheers!
Jennifer Shockley, June 26, 2012
Hadoop Officially a Big Deal for Big Data
June 26, 2012
Hadoop, our favorite batch-processing data management system, is now more important than ever. InfoWorld reveals in “Hadoop Becomes Critical Cog in the Big Data Machine.” The previous version of Apache‘s Hadoop has been adopted by more and more organizations with vast swaths of data to manage. Many users develop their own technologies to complement the Hadoop stack.
Writer Paul Krill details ways NASA, Twitter, Netflix , and Tagged use Hadoop technology, as well as challenges each has faced with the software. Recommended reading for anyone with Hadoop in their lives.
Regarding the upcoming version, the article cites Eric Baldeschwieler, CTO of HortonWorks, a company which has contributed to Hadoop. The write up tells us:
“Hadoop 2.0 focuses on scale and innovation, with Yarn (next-generation MapReduce) and federation capabilities. Yarn will let users add their own compute models so that they do not have to stick to MapReduce. ‘We’re really looking forward to the community inventing many new ways of using Hadoop,’ Baldeschwieler says. Expected uses include real-time applications and machine-learning algorithms. Scalable, pluggable storage is planned also. Always-on capabilities in Version 2.0 will enable clusters with no downtime. Scalable storage is planned as well.”
Notice that MapReduce has been renamed Yarn; the entire layer has been rewritten. Expect Hadoop 2.0 to be generally available within the year.
Cynthia Murrell, June 26, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
A Repositioning of Autonomy: A News Advisory from HP
June 25, 2012
Since obtaining Autonomy, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) has made a great deal of changes in the products that they sell. Now rather than solely selling hardware, it also has its hands in meaning based computing. Most recently, HP came out with the 4 page News Advisory “Autonomy Announces Big Data Solutions in the Cloud.”
According to the report, HP and Autonomy are uniquely positioned to be able to help businesses capitalize on the big data revolution because of their solutions like Autonomy IDOL 10. Solutions like IDOL make it possible for companies to turn disparate data into actionable assets that can make a profit.
The report states:
“As the volume and variety of customer data continues to grow exponentially, marketers are increasingly focused on harnessing the value of this information to accelerate revenue growth. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2017 the chief marketing officer (CMO) will spend more on IT than the chief information officer (CIO). Autonomy is extending its industry-leading digital marketing platform by delivering Autonomy Optimost Clickstream Analytics, which provides marketers with a single, consistent view of visits, conversions and customer engagement.”
By utilizing products like Autonomy IDOL, marketers are able to get a better understanding of their clients interests because they are able to analyze both structured and unstructured data.
Jasmine Ashton, June 25, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Connotate Comments on Data Scraping
June 22, 2012
There are a variety of different ways for businesses to store and manage their date. The recent Connotate blog post “Don’t Miss Out on Key Information With Data Scraping Solutions” regarding the company’s shifting positioning from smart agents to smart agents plus data scraping.
Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program. According to the post, data scraping tools allow businesses to stay ahead of their competition by finding and collecting information online that can be housed in an internal database or shared with customers and employees. Data scraping technology helps businesses better understand your customer’s needs.
The article states:
“Things like current prices on travel or directories of doctors and other resources can help you give complete information to your customers so they continue doing business with you. When you work with Connotate, you can get the scraping solutions you want that will work the way you need them to.”
After reading this post, I’m interested to know, does data scraping suggest pulling content from web pages which have been set up to make it less easy to copy content?
Jasmine Ashton, June 22, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
HANA and Her SAP Happiness
June 20, 2012
It has been a year since SAP launched its in-memory database processor HANA, and the company is pleased with the results, according to the Register’s “SAP Smashes HANA Forecasts, Adds Big Iron Benchmark.” The software more than doubled its revenue forecast, raking in over $200 million. More than half of the 354 HANA customers (64,000 end users) are using the product for non-SAP data. On top of that, SAP as a whole had some of the best profits of its history over the last year.
What’s next for this joyful company? Thomson informs us:
“The company will be announcing new hardware systems for big iron data processing engines. A benchmarking machine using 4,000 processor cores and 100TB of DRAM has given a 600 millisecond data response time querying a 500TB database, [SAP CTO Visha] Sikka said. With new Intel processors SAP should be able to push that even higher, he suggested, and so far eight OEMS are building HANA kit.
“As part of the birthday jamboree, SAP will also be detailing customer wins, including contracts in the Indian banking sector and the oil industry. Sikka also reported that the $155m HANA Real-Tune Fund for database development was also bearing fruit.”
That all sounds great, but we have a couple of questions about dear HANA. Just how does one search the data in it? Is an SAP expert needed? Important to know before investing in the product.
Founded in 1972 by five former IBM workers, SAP is headquartered in Walldorf Germany but has operations in over 50 countries.
Cynthia Murrell, June 20, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Data Management Tools Must Be Bilingual In the Age of Structured and Unstructured Data
June 16, 2012
Attivo recently published the article “Communicating Across the Two Worlds of Structured and Unstructured Information, with SQL,” which makes an apt comparison between the Unified Information Access technology and being bilingual. The UIA platform communicates with both structured and unstructured worlds of data in the same way a bilingual person communicates with people speaking two different languages.
Additionally, the UIA platform also has the capabilities to communicate with separate information sources and with other applications including business intelligence solutions, self-service dashboards and analytic systems.
Data analysis is possible today because of the advent of many tools, according to the article:
“From iPhone and iPad apps to spreadsheets, reporting tools, “self-service” dashboards, various analytic systems, right on up to full-blown ad-hoc drag & drop BI tools, we live in an era where everything is analyzed, and the tools we use for that analysis actually contribute to better decisions. One of the keys to the interoperability of this huge ecosystem is a standards-based approach: the broad use of the Structured Query Language (SQL) is the reason the eco-system exists.”
The only downfall is that users must ensure that the tools they are seeking have the capabilities to “speak” to unstructured content in addition to structured. File this article away for reference as an interesting discussion of structured and unstructured data as “two worlds”.
Megan Feil, June 16, 2012
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