Articles about Big Data

Data can be highly valuable, and no company knows that more than Google. It is constantly collecting a massive amount of it -- it is pretty much how the company butters its bread. Data only has value when it can be used, however, meaning it must ultimately tell a story. In other words, collecting it is only the beginning.

One of the best ways to digest and present data is with visualizations and dashboards. Not everyone is a data scientist, so how you tell a story matters. Today, Google is making a rather nifty data visualization tool an open source project. Called "Embedding Projector", it can show what the search giant calls "high-dimensional data".

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Insurance companies are mostly reluctant to use big data analytics to rate their customers’ driving habits, but the trend is slowly picking up pace, a new report by PTOLEMUS Consulting Group says.

The report is based on an analysis of the world’s 27 largest usage-based insurance (UBI) policies, including those of Admiral, Allianz, Allstate, AXA, Generali, Desjardins, Direct Line, State Farm, The Hartford, UnipolSai, Uniqa and Zurich. It says the number of UBI policies reached 14 million at the end of Q3 this year, but things are still slow.

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Digital transformation is at the top of the strategic agenda for enterprises, and half of executives surveyed believe the next two years will be critical for their organizations.

These are among the findings of a new report by Forbes Insights, in association with Hitachi Data Systems, which surveyed 573 senior executives worldwide as well as holding one-on-one conversations with top executives.

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Big data and analytics have transformed the way businesses operate, and big data increasingly has a profound influence on the daily lives of consumers. The sports world isn’t immune to the impact of big data: Statistics-driven sports like Major League Baseball and the National Football League have long crunched numbers to make key decisions, so using big data is a natural progression.

During last summer’s Olympic Games in Rio, analysts and trainers pored over data to predict performance and develop strategies. Whether motivated by profit or the quest for a win, greater efficiency and increased accuracy, the sporting world is embracing big data to improve performance. Here are three ways big data is making sports smarter:

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The world is ever more reliant on data, but consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about where their personal details are stored and who has access to them.

Professional technology standards body IEEE has carried out a survey of 1,000 UK adults which finds that 81 percent believe the public should be better educated on how their data is being used online.

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Unless you’ve been hiding away from the world of computing for the last few years, you’ll have come across Hadoop.

Apache Hadoop, to give it its full name, is an open source framework designed to handle the storage and processing of large amounts of data using low-cost commodity hardware. Since its initial release in 2011, it has become one of the most popular platforms for handling big data.

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Big data is another technology buzzword that can sometimes be difficult to pin down. Data, of course, has been around for a long time, long before computers invaded our homes, offices and pockets, so what exactly differentiates ordinary data from big data?

Broadly speaking, big data refers to datasets that can no longer be processed through traditional methods of analysis. This means that setting a minimum boundary for what constitutes big data is extremely difficult, as this value would likely change with each technological development. What is clear, however, is that big data is growing rapidly. The rise of digital technologies, particularly smartphones, has meant that the amount of information that we freely share, knowingly or not, is enormous.

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We’ve already covered fintech, and now it’s time to have a look at another technology portmanteau: martech. Short for marketing technology, it refers to innovative new approaches to campaigns and other marketing tactics, driven by software and hardware developments.

It is an area that is experiencing rapid growth, with worldwide martech spending expected to reach $32 billion by 2018, up from $22.6 billion in 2015. Because many of the tools behind the growth of martech are relatively new, such as customer relationship management software and big data analytics, they are generating both opportunities and challenges for many marketers. The test facing businesses is whether they can remain agile enough to harness these new martech solutions to gain a competitive edge.

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Market analyst company Gartner has issued a report that says that investment in big data is up, but fewer companies are actually planning on investing in this field. While 48 percent of companies have invested in big data in 2016, up three percent compared to the year before, the percentage those who plan on investing within the next two years is down from 31 to 25 per cent.

According to Paul Cant, EMEA head of enterprise solutions operation for BMC Software, businesses are giving up on big data because they failed to implement it properly and are not really reaping the benefits.

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Thanks to the explosion in cloud applications and the increasing number of IoT devices, enterprises have more data than ever. But there's no easy way to ensure its quality.

Data management specialist Informatica is launching its Cloud Data Quality Radar a self-service data quality solution for business. Salesforce users will be the first to benefit.

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HP Enterprise's announcement earlier this month that it was spinning off its 'non-core' software business, including the Autonomy big data solution to Micro Focus, has left many customers worried about the future.

Archiving, analytics and compliance specialist Actiance is hoping to attract these users with the launch of an Autonomy Safe Landing Program, letting users easily transition to its Alcatraz archiving product.

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SAP has officially announced that it has acquired the startup Altiscale, which offers cloud based versions of the Hadoop and Spark open source software for storing, processing and analyzing many different kinds of data.

Rumors of the acquisition began to circulate a month ago when it was believed that SAP intended to purchase the company for over $125 million. Neither company though would confirm or deny the rumors, but during the course of the next few weeks, SAP executives began to comment on the deal.

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While there is huge interest in data analytics among the business community many organizations are struggling with failed projects according to a new study which reveals 88 percent of respondents have suffered failures with recent initiatives.

Reasons for the failure of analytics projects include low end-user adoption, projects going over budget, systems not providing the analytics users were expecting, and too many initiatives evolving into 'zombie' projects that were almost completed but not ready for end-users.

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While businesses are keen to get the benefits of big data, analysts find it hard to harness information across the enterprise and find relationships between data sets.

This can result in labor-intensive manual processes and a pool of unmanageable data that soaks up more and more resources in the quest for something useful.

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The pressure to move towards using big data can often lead to management practices lagging behind. While storage is managed often data flows aren't, which leads to breakdowns and corruption of the data.

The bigger and more complex the data, the greater the problem becomes. To address this, San Francisco-based StreamSets is launching its Dataflow Performance Manager (DPM), a solution that makes it possible to manage the operations of a company's end-to-end dataflows within a single pane.

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