Why We Need To Kill “Big Data”

It’s the New Year and along with resolutions about eating healthier, being kinder and exercising more frequently, I’d like to add one more to the list. Let’s banish the term “big data” with pivot, cloud and all the other meaningless buzzwords we have grown to hate. To be completely honest–I have been one of the bigger abusers of the term in posts, as you can see here, here and here. It seems like every enterprise startup nowadays is in “big data.” There are even venture funds devoted to investing in “big data” startups. Why have I grown to...

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Why We Need To Kill “Big Data”

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Forrester: SaaS And Data-Driven “Smart” Apps Fueling Worldwide Software Growth

Forrester Research is citing SaaS and data-driven smart apps as the major growth engines for the worldwide software market. The SaaS software market will increase 25 percent in 2013 to $59 billion, a 25 percent increase. In 2014, the market is expected to total $75 billion. Forrester uses the term “smart computing” to define apps that, for instance, provide direct access to data for decision-making. It also includes data analytics and business...

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EMC Acquires Storage, Cloud Automation Software Developer iWave

EMC (NYSE:EMC) has quietly acquired iWave Software, a developer of storage and cloud automation software solutions for enterprises, solution providers and OEMs. An EMC spokesperson confirmed the acquisition, noting that it is not uncommon for EMC to make a small acquisition and not formally announce it. iWave, however, was a bit less quiet. The company on Friday replaced the homepage of its website with an open letter from CEO Brent Rhymes, who wrote that iWave has "successfully collaborated with EMC Corporation...

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How To Make Big Decisions Quickly

What do I do all day ? I get this question asked of me from time to time and it’s a fair one: as a CTO, what exactly do I do all day? The fact is my daily routine has changed dramatically over the years. While I still spend a lot of hands-on time immersed in technology, our code, architecture and checking in on development milestones, I would characterize a large portion of my time is now spent doing two things: growing a talent base and helping my team make big decisions. In a future post, I will talk about the process and techniques I...

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Why You'll Need A Big Data Ethics Expert

Big data is a big deal for companies in 2013. The prospect of outdistancing your competition by leveraging your company's data with huge data sources such as NASA, the government, video and demographic services is compelling. But there's evidence that technology is advancing faster than companies and governments can manage it. Along with big data technology developers, your company should be thinking about adding a "big data ethicist." The need for big data technologists is well covered in the media. At the annual Gartner IT Symposium,...

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Facebook Mobile User Counts Revealed: 192M Android, 147M iPhone, 48M iPad, 56M Messenger

Facebook keeps user counts for its mobile apps hidden, but analyst Benedict Evans found a way to uncover them and they provide critical insight into the direction and performance of Facebook’s mobile efforts. Most interestingly, Facebook’s Android user count is growing much faster than its iPhone user base, but is found on a lower percentage of Android devices. Let’s take a closer look at the data. A year ago, Facebook stopped reporting user...

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Like Big Data, Operational Intelligence is Evolving to Deliver Right Time Value

Ventana Research has been researching and advocating operational intelligence for the past 10 years, but not always with that name. From the use of events and analytics in business process management and the need for hourly and daily operational business intelligence, but its alignment with traditional BI architecture didn’t allow for a seamless system, so a few years later the discussion started to focus around business process management and the ability of companies to monitor and analyze BPM on top of their enterprise applications....

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9 + 5 Reasons to Upgrade to Informatica PowerCenter 9.5

Increase Agility in Delivering Critical Data and Reports to the Business Access, profile and merge existing data and “big” data in real-time to deliver new insights rapidly with the PowerCenter Data Virtualization Edition. Harness the Power of Big Data Leverage leading Hadoop distributions with enhanced capabilities loading to, processing on, and extracting from Hadoop. Connect with Social Media Data Capture feedback from social media streams with a streaming API for incoming data feeds, including enhanced Facebook,...

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Big Data Apps: The Next Big Thing?

What's the best solution to the looming shortage of data scientists, those high priests of analytics who glean meaning from big data? One option is to build big data applications that automate many data scientist tasks, thereby enabling less technical business workers to make data-driven decisions without first consulting the resident data guru. In a similar vein, big data can play a major role in the development of learning machines that make recommendations, not simply serve up results and leave the analysis and interpretation up to humans....

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'The Hobbit' Creates Big Data Challenge For Moviemaker

When it comes to manipulating massive amounts of digital information, few creative industries can match the data-intensive workloads of movie and TV production. And the advent of cutting-edge motion picture and HDTV technologies, including high frame rate (HFR) 3-D and 4K TV, will generate even more data. "High-definition cameras and the new wave in which people create effects and try to enthrall the audience have resulted in a pretty big...

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Why do we need Business Intelligence ?

It’s a classic question that has a classic answer – companies need to translate data into information in order to make strategic business decisions. Companies continuously create data whether they store it in flat files, spreadsheets or databases.  This data is extremely valuable to your company.  It’s more than just a record of what was sold yesterday, last week or last month.  It should be used to look at sales trends in order to plan marketing campaigns or to decide what resources to allocate to specific sales teams. ...

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Why do we need Business Intelligence ?

It’s a classic question that has a classic answer – companies need to translate data into information in order to make strategic business decisions. Companies continuously create data whether they store it in flat files, spreadsheets or databases.  This data is extremely valuable to your company.  It’s more than just a record of what was sold yesterday, last week or last month.  It should be used to look at sales trends in order to plan marketing campaigns or to decide what resources to allocate to specific sales teams. ...

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30+ free tools for data visualization and analysis

The chart below originally accompanied our story 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis (April 20, 2011). We're updating it as we cover additional tools, including 8 cool tools for data analysis, visualization and presentation (March 27, 2012), Startup offers 1-click data analysis (Aug. 29, 2012), Infogr.am offers quick Web charts (Oct. 16, 2012) and Create simple, free charts with Datawrapper (Nov. 21, 2012). Click through to those articles for full tool reviews. Features: You can sort the chart by clicking on any column header once...

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Startup offers 1-click data analysis

Spreadsheets are a good tool for looking at data; but if you want more robust insight into your information, software like SAS and SPSS can be somewhat daunting for the non-statistically savvy. "There's a huge gap between Excel and the high-end tools," argues Greg Laughlin, whose fledgling startup Statwing hopes to fill part of that space. In fact, Excel includes a reasonable number of statistical functions -- the issue is more that even...

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