Big Data

  • Are you ready for IBM Watson?

    This week marks the one year anniversary of the IBM Watson computer system succeeding at Jeopardy!. Since then, IBM has gotten a lot of interest in Watson.  Companies want one of those. But what exactly is Watson and what makes it unique?  What does it mean to have a Watson?  And, how is commercial Watson

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  • Next in my discussion of big data providers is IBM.   Big data plays right into IBM’s portfolio of solutions in the information management space.  It also dove tails very nicely with the company’s Smarter Planet strategy.  Smarter Planet holds the vision of the world as a more interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent place.  IBM’s Smarter Cities

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  • Next up in my discussion on big data providers is SAS.  What’s interesting about SAS is that, in many ways, big data analytics is really just an evolution for the company.  One of the company’s goals has always been to support complex analytical problem solving.  It is well respected by its customers for its ability

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  • I am often asked whether it is the vendors or the end users who are driving the Big Data market. I usually reply that both are. There are early adopters of any technology that push the vendors to evolve their own products and services. The vendors then show other companies what can be done with

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  • For more years than I like to admit, I have been focused on the importance of managing data so that it helps companies anticipate changes and therefore be prepared to take proactive action. Therefore, as I watched the market for predictive analytics really emerge I thought it was important to provide customers with a holistic

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  • Earlier this week, Informatica announced the release of the Informatica 9.1 Platform for Big Data. The company joins other data centric vendors such as EMC and IBM by putting its stake in the ground around the hot topic of Big Data. Informatica defines Big Data as, “all data, including both transaction and interaction data, in

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  • I attended EMC’s User Conference last week in Las Vegas. The theme of the event was Big Data meets the Cloud. So, what’s going on with Big Data and EMC? Does this new strategy make sense? EMC acquired Greenplum in 2010. At the time EMC described Greenplum as a “shared nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP)

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  • In 2007, Hurwitz & Associates fielded one of the first market studies on text analytics. At that time, text analytics was considered to be more of a natural extension to a business intelligence system than a content management system. However, in that study, we asked respondents who were planning to use the software, whether they

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  • What is advanced analytics?

    There has been a lot of discussion recently around advanced analytics. I’d like to throw my definition into the rink. I spent many years at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s and 1990s deploying what I would call advanced analytics. This included utilizing statistical and mathematical models to understand customer behavior, predict retention, or analyze

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  • Advanced Analytics was a big topic at the IBM IOD conference last week. As part of this, predictive analytics was again an important piece of the story along with other advanced analytics capabilities IBM has developed or is in the process of developing to support optimization. These include Big Insights (for big data), analyzing data

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