Choosing the Best Fit Enterprise Infrastructure
February 28, 2013
A writer from Search CIO laments that big data is not in fact rocket science in a recent article, “Data Mining Challenges on the Horizon: Got Big Data? Now What?” This writer attended a two-hour seminar which was sponsored by the Mass Technology Leadership Council and moderated by the global VP of Oracle’s Health Sciences business unit, Kris Joshi,
We learned from this article that infrastructure has been targeted as a high priority and there are several solutions:
Harvard, for example, has a new data center in Holyoke, Mass., that will be able to handle 40,000 calls. It’s the university’s last, by the way, according to Clamp, because when this baby no longer computes, the next cluster will be in the cloud. In the big data puzzle, as Broad’s Trunnell put it, infrastructure is “in many ways the easiest one to solve.” Heck, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is using Oracle’s Exa-line products to help monitor a purported 50 billion transactions per day.
Big data may not be rocket science but many enterprise organizations have found that choosing the appropriate technology for their specific case can be a tough job. We recommend starting with the fundamental component to a big data solution and employing an enterprise infrastructure focused on data delivery.
Megan Feil, February 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Power of Information: Saving Money And Exceeding Expectations
February 27, 2013
Many organizations have a hard time managing large amount of information across business systems from a variety of sources both in and out of their enterprise. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) are the answer for those businesses finding it hard to cope.
In both “ECM:Governing The Power Of Information” and “CEM:Experiencing The Power Of Information” we find that good companies find a way to make it work. The results of good content management are cost reduction, better time management, improved records retrieval, and better file processing.
“Information is a critical enterprise asset. The effective management of enterprise information has become a key differentiator in today’s competitive market. Unmanaged business information can be risky and drive up costs. Well-governed information, on the other hand, provides a path to success by reducing risk and uncovering opportunities to drive business value.”
Systems that work and an interoperability between systems is key to customer satisfaction at this juncture in the road. It seems that CEM can help businesses reach markets and customers by creating consistent digital presence across platforms and continues to grow as business priorities change.
Leslie Radcliff, February 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Sinequa Highlighted by Yandex
February 22, 2013
I noticed this morning that Sinequa, a vendor which provides a unified information access solution has been moved to the top of the Yandex results list. I was poking around the Yandex system to see how the Google challenger was handling some European analytics, content processing, business intelligence, and search vendors.
On a previous test, Yandex displayed a link to a site offering translations of Latin phrases. (Sinequa, as you may recall from your school days, can be translated as “an essential component or element.” I had one Latin teacher suggest that sinequa indicated “none higher.” Yet another of the specialists who with whom I studied boiled the connotation down to “excellence.”)
CrunchBase describes the company this way:
Sinequa helps companies and organizations to cope with the data explosion and enterprise transformation. Sinequa’s unique value proposition is to provide an out-of-the-box enterprise search solution leveraging all enterprise content, resulting in significant savings for large organizations. Sinequa’s customers are some of the most innovative companies in the world including Siemens, Mercer, EADS, Saint-Gobain, SalesForce.com, Bouygues, SFR, Atos Origin, Loreal, LCF Rothschild, Credit Agricole, the French Ministry of Defense, Groupe Figaro.
You can obtain more information about the company at www.sinequa.com. As an aside, I find the Yandex results increasingly useful. Check the system out at www.yandex.com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 22, 2013
Information At Work Collects Data But Delivers Insights
February 20, 2013
Industries from education to business to politics and even government are using big data to inform decisions and to achieve efficiency and transparency. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a news story on the OECD Observer from Martine Durand, Director, OECD Directorate of Statistics recently called, “Can Big Data Deliver On It’s Promise?”
Revealing statistics were shared in this article. For example, according to the UN Global Pulse, more data was created in 2011 than in the whole of human history.
The article states:
International organisations are getting involved too, the creation of UN Global Pulse being a case in point. The OECD has also been harnessing the potential of big data. Collecting statistics and understanding trends are the daily bread of our organisation, and we have built innovative, interactive tools to draw in more and better information from the public. This, in turn, feeds into improving the policy recommendations we give to governments.
The enterprise is an area where we see a huge potential for efficiency to be increased. Tools like Information at Work from PolySpot provide the cross function infrastructure that companies need to collect and deliver information in real time.
Megan Feil, February 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Source and Deliver Information Across Multiple Enterprise Applications with PolySpot
February 19, 2013
We stumbled across an article from TLNT that discusses big data as it pertains to the HR world in light of some other articles from major sources like the New York Times and SAP. “Big Data: It’s Just Useless Information Unless You Put It To Work” asks businesses to inquire within their HR departments about using data to ask deeper questions about the way people work.
The author recommends using big data, and the strategic and social recognition possible through it, to inform and gauge performance amongst employees.
The referenced article enlightens us on the topic of using big data to increase efficiency in employee work patterns:
Translating that to the world of people management, data can transform how we view individuals, their capabilities and their work by giving us more information to correct flawed or incomplete perceptions and, as Brooks said, “illuminate patterns of behavior we haven’t yet noticed.” This is particularly powerful in terms of employee behaviors related to what we say is most important to our organizations – our core values.
While big data and the technological solutions needed to access it may help uncover employee work patterns, it will also become necessary then to tap into multiple enterprise applications they use in order to gauge their performance. Solutions like PolySpot enable both sourcing data and information delivery across different file types.
Megan Feil, February 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
New Visual Analytics Tool Arrives Right on Time for Midsized Businesses
February 19, 2013
SAS has announced a new product geared toward work groups and midsize businesses. The new SAS Visual Analytics brings an enterprise-level computing ability to scaled down systems and works with database appliances Greenplum and Teradata.
According to “SAS Rolls Out Visual Analytics for Work Groups and Midsized Businesses,” by 2015 more than 30 percent of analytics projects will deliver insights based on structured and unstructured data. This is important to know because small business intelligence will have to scale up in order to meet the demand. That’s where SAS comes in.
“Designed as a starting point for organizations wanting to add analytics to their business strategies, SAS Visual Analytics’ self-service option lets business users explore their data without having to seek assistance from their IT departments.”
While SAS touts its new software as more than just a simple business intelligence product and confirms that it will be fast and easy to use there is still the question of whether or not the software can live up to its billing as a useful to those businesses with a handful of users, all the way up to global deployment. Seems ambitious.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that it is a step up from the small business platforms that are currently on the market. It will be an interesting system to watch unfold as it moves into the future.
Leslie Radcliff, February 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Information Delivery Solutions Maximize Value of Big Data
February 15, 2013
It is no surprise that we are seeing many exciting developments happening on a more specific level in the midst of these larger cultural and technological changes following the rise of big data. Science Daily discusses how a crowdsourcing platform that initially began in the commercial sector can solve a complex biological problem even faster than former, traditional approaches in the article, “Solving Big Data Bottleneck: Scientists Team with Business Innovators to Tackle Research Hurdles.”
Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and London Business School have partnered with TopCoder, a crowdsourcing platform with a global community of 450,000 algorithm specialists and software developers, and have discovered that this community is highly adept in solving the kinds of problems typically delegated to post docs.
The article quotes Karim Lakhani, associate professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School:
This study makes us think about greater efficiencies in academic research can be obtained. In a traditional setting, a life scientist who needs large volumes of data analyzed will hire a postdoc to create a solution, and it could take well over a year. We’re showing that in certain instances, existing platforms and communities might solve these problems better, cheaper and faster.
Many organizations in the business sector, in addition to the realm of academics, are searching for more efficient ways to store, organize and process big data in order to maximize the value from it. Information delivery solutions are great tools in enabling organizations to access insights from big data across the entire company.
Megan Feil, February 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
PolySpot Solutions Enable Data Scientists to Arrive at More Accurate Conclusions
February 11, 2013
We all know that big data means more information but as a recent article “Beware the Errors of ‘Big Data’” from Wired points out, there is also the potential for more false information to arise because of big data.
Antifragile, a concept explored in the article, is having the unique position and ability to be be capable of benefiting from uncertainty and complexity at the expense of others. Big data researchers or data scientists have the power to choose to stop their research and inquiries when they have the right result that they need.
We learned more about this perspective that more data does not automatically produce meaningful and correct information:
But beyond that, big data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). It’s a property of sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researcher’s computer, there is. Large deviations are likely to be bogus.
While there is certainly the potential for improper conclusions to be drawn from data due to the nature of decision-making, this could mean that data scientists need to rely further on technology to aid them in this process. Solutions like PolySpot enable departments across the enterprise to tap into the insights produced by big data and the organization wide access offers the transparency and accountability organizations are looking for.
Megan Feil, February 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Information Connectivity Enabled Across the Enterprise with PolySpot
February 8, 2013
One of the reasons that big data is so big is because of the large number of devices in which data can be generated. An infographic from Techi popped up recently that describes how “Big Data is Bigger than Most Realize and discusses this and the larger implications. The article references IBM‘s report that says 90 percent of the world’s data has been accumulated in the last two years.
Peer to peer communication and social networking data make up the largest chunk of the zettabytes that are out there. The infographic attempts to relay an overarching perspective on how far technology has come by sharing that one zettabyte book would require 3 times the number of trees in the world for paper.
The infographic was framed in the following context:
On the tail of the release of a report that showed how synthetic DNA could be used to store zettabytes of data in the palm of our hand, it’s important to understand just how much information that really is. The term “big data” is already appearing to be the most overused word of the year in 2013 and it’s only January, so grasping the size of how big it all really is makes for an interesting visualization.
While many organizations will never need to crunch zettabytes this year, they will undoubtedly benefit from storing and analyzing petabytes and exabytes. Solutions like those from PolySpot aid in an organization’s ability to connect data from various sources and churn out meaningful insights from pieces in order to make a whole.
Megan Feil, February 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Andreessen Predicts Trouble for Traditional Workers
February 8, 2013
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has some strong, educated opinions about the ups and downs of technology-related businesses and where the industry is headed. TechCrunch shares an interview with the professional prognosticator in, “Marc Andreessen on the Future of Enterprise.”
Journalist Alexia Tsotsis spoke to Andreessen for her piece, “The Enterprise Cool Kids” (also at TechCrunch), but thought the interview insightful enough to share in its entirety. The piece retains the casual, conversational tone of their chat.
The two cover a lot of ground: an industry focus that continually swings between enterprise and consumer markets; a decrease in hardware investments in favor of a shift to the cloud; the nimbleness of new businesses run by millennials compared to the comparatively bogged-down state of larger companies. The piece as a whole is a valuable read.
What caught our eye most, though, was Andreessen’s predictions for the worker bees among us. He states:
“It feels a lot like in the new economy you will have a lot more contractors. You will have a lot more people with sort of fluid careers contracting on a project basis, and then all this technology is going to be an enabling layer for that. . . .
“For some people it feels great to never be tied to a specific employer and to always be doing contract work and be changing jobs every two years, and it feels like it’s fun and exciting and exhilarating. For a lot of people that’s really scary. And so the lifetime employment promise that the big companies used to be able to make was very compelling for a lot of people because it felt safe.
“So now you are in a world where the big companies can’t deliver — even if they wanted to deliver on lifetime employment, they can’t.”
You have been warned.
Cynthia Murrell, February 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
