
Transforming Data Into Action – Part Two
In part one of this series we looked at big data and transforming it into smart data, or data that is contextual, relevant and delivered to the right people / person at the right time. One of the other interesting and growing use cases in the business use of data is something called small data. […]

Product is Not a Four-Letter Word
“Customers buy 1/4″ holes, not 1/4″ bits.” – Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School At some point in every marketer’s career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean machine […]

Amazon Redshift Disrupts DW Economics – But Nothing Comes Without Costs
At its first re:Invent conference in Late November, Amazon announced Redshift, a new managed service for data warehousing. Amazon also offered details and customer examples that made AWS’ steady inroads toward enterprise, mainstream application acceptance very visible. Redshift is made available via MPP nodes of 2TB (XL) or 16TB (8XL), running Paraccel’s high-performance columnar, compressed […]

Hadoop Distributions And Kids’ Soccer
The big players are moving in for a piece of the Big Data action. IBM, EMC, and NetApp have stepped up their messaging, in part to prevent startup upstarts like Cloudera from cornering the Apache Hadoop distribution market. They are all elbowing one another to get closest to “pure Apache” while still “adding value.” Numerous […]

IBM Fills Out Netezza Lineup With High Capacity Appliance
In the months since IBM closed its Netezza acquisition, the data warehouse appliance pioneer has been busy, if the announcements at this week’s Enzee are any indication. An enthusiastic crowd – 1000 strong – heard CEO Jim Baum deliver the news: new hardware, software and partnerships.The biggest news was The Appliance Formerly Known As Cruiser, […]

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 […]

Cloudera Convenes Colleagues to Crunch Content (Make Mine Membase)
Over the past two years, Cloudera has demonstrated the power of surrounding emerging open source software with support services, expertise and its own IP. The firm has racked up over 30 customers since its founding in late 2008, and emerged as the leading source of Apache Hadoop. Cloudera’s recent C round of financing brought its […]

Cloudera-Informatica Deal Opens Broader Horizons for Both
Cloudera‘s continuing focus on the implications of explosive data growth has led it to another key partnership, this time with Informatica. Connecting to the dominant player in data integration and data quality expands the opportunity for Cloudera dramatically; it enables the de facto commercial Hadoop leader to find new ways to empower the “silent majority” […]