Hadoop is Many Things Including the Ideal ETL Tool for Big Data Analytics
The success of the recent Strata and Structure conferences (conclusions from last year’s conference and resulting trends can be found here) reinforced the accelerating corporate interest in big data and the specific need for applications and techniques that take advantage of Hadoop. Based on the presentations I attended or read about, it appears that more [...]
Impressions from Strata 2011
Last week I attended Strata, a conference organized by O’ Reilly and devoted to big data. I was a large conference (790 attendees) whose content included both technical talks and tutorials about the new generation of big data tools, e.g., Hadoop, Cassandra, visualization, as well presentations on big data business applications. The diversity and size [...]
Business Analytics Obstacles
Last week my partners and I hosted a meeting of our IT Advisory Board. This board consists of senior IT executives from Global 2000 companies including CIOs and CTOs. I will write about the topics discussed in this meeting in a few days, once I had the opportunity to clean up the several pages of [...]
We Need a New Generation of eCommerce Analytics
In 1996, while I was running IBM’s BI solutions organization, one of my groups developed the Surfaid web analytics solution. Surfaid, one of the first such solutions, was later acquired by Coremetrics (that was in turn recently acquired by IBM and made part of its marketing automation solution). Later on Omniture dominated the high-end web [...]
Mobile Data Analytics
Over the past couple of years I have met with several startups that offer analytic solutions for mobile data. I have not invested in any of them. I had felt that the data captured from feature phones and early generations of smartphones was not rich enough to lead to interesting and distinct analytics. For example, while data captured from a mobile web browser such as sites visited, pageviews, time spent browsing could be analyzed, we didn’t need a new company to do that. Omniture could do that just fine. However, the new smartphones capture more interesting data. These data sets…
Insight as a Service
The survey data presented in last August’s Pacific Crest SaaS workshop pointed to the need for a variety of data analytic services. These services that can be offered under, Insight-as-a-Service, can range from business benchmarking, e.g., compare one business to its peers’ that are also customers of the same SaaS vendor, to business process improvement recommendations based on a SaaS application’s usage, e.g., reduce the amount spent on search keywords by using the SEM application’s keyword optimization module, to improving business practices by integrating syndicated data with a client’s own data, e.g., reduce the response time to customer service requests…
IBM’s Business Analytics Blogger Event
Last Tuesday I was invited to speak at an IBM event for technology bloggers. The event addressed two topics that represent key growth priorities for IBM: business analytics and smarter planet. IBM’s Fred Balboni, Global Business Lead for Analytics (responsible for all business analytics services at IBM), Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Technologies, and Mike [...]
Thoughts on Big Data
Earlier in the year I wrote about areas of investment interest for 2010 and included Big Data aggregation, management, and data mining/processing. A couple of weeks ago I had attended Gigaom’s Structure 2010, a conference devoted to big data. As is also noted by Derrick Harris here there is a growing market of vendors that [...]
