Companies are increasingly tuning into the importance of understanding their customers in order to make their marketing more effective and big data has a key role to play in providing them with the information to do so.

A new infographic produced by big data analytics platform Datameer looks at how companies are using big data to build their brands and boost revenue.

Continue reading →

Data center teams face one crisis after another, but at least one has remained constant over recent years. The tidal wave of data, especially related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data, continues to grow at phenomenal rates, threatening to overwhelm operations for many enterprises. IT teams are struggling to keep their heads above this deluge of digital information, scale storage and processing resources to handle the data, and simultaneously provide the ubiquitous connectivity required for today's Internet of Things.

Fortunately, data center equipment providers have been evolving the data center foundations. IT and facilities teams have the life vests and rafts that they need, if they know how to use them.

Continue reading →

We constantly hear about the benefits big data can bring to organizations, but a shortage of expertise means that many are missing out. A recent McKinsey report reckoned that the US alone faces a shortage of up to 190,000 people with big data skills.

In order to overcome this DataRPM is introducing Smart Machine Insights which uses machine learning to automatically model data, perform advanced statistical analyses, and present key insights to users in an easy to use visual format.

Continue reading →

Analytics can be worthless, counterproductive and even harmful when based on data that isn’t high quality. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. So when Salesforce Analytics Cloud hit the market, vendors rushed to announce plugins that would load high-quality data into the solution.

The painful truth is that without high-quality data, it doesn’t matter how fast or sophisticated the analytics capability is. You simply won’t be able to turn all that data managed by IT into effective business execution.

Continue reading →

As more businesses want to take advantage of the insights that analysis of big data can offer there's greater demand for the cloud to allow direct access to stored data.

San Francisco-based big data platform specialist Datameer was the first big data analytics platform purpose built for Hadoop. Now the company is first to market with a big data analytics platform designed specifically for the cloud.

Continue reading →

As the need for real-time data increases thanks to the Internet of Things and growing demand for mobile services, organizations are looking for new ways to capture and process information.

In response to this demand database company VoltDB is launching version 5.0 of its in-memory database application offering increased support for the Hadoop ecosystem, expanded SQL support and a new Management Center.

Continue reading →

Organizations have spent billions of pounds on ERP and CRM systems, and today they’re sitting on petabytes of big data gold mines. The most astute CEOs are looking for new opportunities to use their data assets to extract predictive and prescriptive analytics that evaluate how their companies are performing. From sales, to pricing and profitability, and even customer attrition, companies are learning to use this data to better serve their customers, and drive value for their products and services.

As 2015 unfolds, we’ll see changes in the world of big data as even more companies use predictive and prescriptive analytics as competitive differentiators:

Continue reading →

Businesses are keen to harness the benefits of big data, but traditional database solutions are often confined by their design, making them hard to scale.

Aerospike which claims to be the world's fastest database has unveiled new features and enhancements to its product to improve performance, streamline deployment and breed a new generation of real-time, context-driven applications.

Continue reading →

Progressive organizations recognize data as a strategic asset and rely upon it for critical decision making. Business intelligence spending has been steadily increasing and is forecast to be upwards of $16 billion worldwide in the next year.

Major investment and effort are spent on data extraction, transformation and load (ETL) from source systems into data warehouses and data marts. Incorrect decisions based on poor data can be disastrous, so how can we ensure that we are utilising the proper data to begin with? In order to do so, we must be able to address the following data quality considerations:

Continue reading →

Enterprise software specialist SAP has announced the availability of a new manufacturing application to help deliver data integration across businesses using the SAP HANA platform.

SAP Manufacturing Execution includes the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application and SAP Plant Connectivity software. This allows it to provide machine-to-machine integration and orchestrate intelligent manufacturing.

Continue reading →

Analysis of large volumes of information is increasingly used by businesses to gain an advantage. A new infographic produced by big data specialist Datameer looks at how it’s being used to gain a competitive edge.

Among the highlights are that the global Hadoop Market is projected to be worth $50.2 billion by the year 2020, a huge increase from the $1.5 billion it was worth in 2012.

Continue reading →

Databases are important to enterprises of all sizes, but building applications to exploit data effectively can be time consuming and expensive.

Now Splice Machine, maker of the only Hadoop RDBMS (relational database management system), is making its product publicly available for the first time. It will allow database architects and app developers to build real-time, scalable applications without the burden or cost of a traditional RDBMS.

Continue reading →

With high-tech player tracking and analysis systems gaining serious traction in the world of professional sport, data can now be used to instantly analyze player and team performance like never before.

But this hasn’t always been the case, as we found out from former Manchester United player and coach Phil Neville, who helped to shed some light on the role of big data in professional football and how it has changed throughout his career.

Continue reading →

Everything in life has consequences, and that goes especially for data breaches. Big data holds a significant amount of information that can lead to the identification of individual users -- this makes the privacy of users a primary concern and also means that the consequences of a breach can be even more damaging than usual.

Following a big data breach, not only does the aftermath serve to disrepute an organization, but it can also have a negative impact from a legal stand point. A security breach will affect a significantly larger group of people; therefore, organizations have to ensure that they achieve the correct balance between the use of the data and their users' privacy.

Continue reading →

In large companies it can be difficult for decision makers to see the full impact their choices have. A new product from decision support specialists Mu Sigma aims to provide a holistic picture of how things are connected.

The product, called muUniverse, is designed to give decision makers at Fortune 500 companies a complete view of their business decisions, allowing them to navigate an increasingly complex set of interconnected problems they face in areas such as sales, marketing, finance, supply chain, risk, and others.

Continue reading →