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CIO Tough Love: Agility Demands Increasing

Michael Fitzgerald — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:27 EDT

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Want to be a transformative CIO? Be prepared for lots of frustration and failure, and try to fail as fast as you can, because the future is coming faster than anybody can imagine. That was the theme of the 10th annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, which took place Wednesday at MIT.

The boss certainly expects IT to move quickly. "Agility is critical," said Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai, during a panel on the CEO's perspective and influence on innovation. That comment was echoed by the other CEOs on the panel, Kazuhiro Gomi of NTT America, and BlazeMeter founder and CEO Alon Girmonsky, who put it starkly, "not being agile means you simply die, you simply vanish. You need a process, an ecosystem to support agility."

Wide Data Vs. Big Data

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:58 EDT

Rather than thinking about the physical size of data, consider the importance of being able to relate different sets of data. For financial services firms, the complexity isn't found in the need to store more data; it is in how best to link, arbitrate and cleanse all of the data required to support regulatory needs. So, it becomes less about how big the data is and more about its breadth and reach across the organization. The new challenge in the next few years will revolve around managing what could be called Wide Data.

Regulations Influencing the Wide Data Trend

In the next two years, regulations will be enforced across a variety of operational and technical areas. The following regulatory requirements highlight the need for investment into strategic data programs:

Hadoop 2.0: New Big Data Possibilities

Doug Henschen — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:06 EDT

Hadoop 2.0 will be announced within a matter of days, and a new YARN framework component at its core promises to "take Hadoop beyond MapReduce," according to Arun Murthy, chairman of the Apache committee overseeing the release. Moving beyond slow, iterative MapReduce processing is obviously a good thing, but just what are the new possibilities?

Better SQL querying, graph analysis and stream processing are all on the short list, according to Murthy, a Yahoo veteran who co-founded Hortonworks. He describes YARN (a slightly-off acronym for Yet Another Resource Manager) as a kind of large-scale, distributed operating system for big data applications. As is typical with operating systems, there's some question about what will and what won't work with YARN, but more on that later.

Big Data Tool Mimics Human Problem Solving Technique

Jeff Bertolucci — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:06 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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We humans solve problems every day of our lives. In most cases, we base our decisions on past experiences. Now an emerging technology called case-based reasoning strives to emulate that problem-solving strategy.

SAP Steps Up Visual Analytics, Mobile BI

Cindi Howson — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:06 EDT

Last week's Sapphire Conference marked my fourth since BusinessObjects was acquired by SAP in 2008, and this year's event stands out as one of the most exciting in terms of business analytics developments. Perhaps it's because the company has moved beyond three years of integration and beyond last year's apologies for SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 delays and quality issues. This year, many more customers are live on the latest products.

SAP's biggest business analytics news was all about visual data discovery and mobile big data. Visual data discovery continues to be one of the hottest segments in business intelligence, as indicated by the buzz around last week's IPO by data-visualization specialist Tableau Software. SAP's big news on this front at Sapphire was the rebranding of its Visual Intelligence product as "Lumira."

Dublin Points Big Data Tech At Traffic Jams

Jeff Bertolucci — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:29 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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The Dublin City Council (DCC), which provides housing, water and transportation services to 1.2 million people, is using big data strategies to help the area's bus traffic move smoothly.

Tableau, Marketo Cash In With Timely IPOs

Doug Henschen — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:02 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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Tableau Software's stock debuted at $31 per share on Friday and it finished the day at $50.75, up 63%. Marketo, too, launched its IPO on Friday and its stock shot up 79% from the opening price of $13 per share to $23.25.

It was a case of good timing for two companies cashing in on big trends in the technology industry. Investors associate data-visualization player Tableau with big data, but company co-founder Christian Chabot says the company addresses data of any size.

U.K. Has $10 Billion Of Public Data, Study Concludes

Gary Flood — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:11 EDT

Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs

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An independent study commissioned by the U.K. government to measure its progress in making use of public-sector data concludes headway is being made -- but that the pace needs to pick up.

SAP Vows Hana Is Ready To Run ERP

Doug Henschen — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:02 EDT

You get the feeling that SAP was bound and determined to announce at this week's Sapphire Conference that its core Business Suite applications are ready to run on the Hana in-memory database platform. But for some the question is, just how ready is "ready?"

It's hard to believe anybody could question Hana's readiness given that SAP has been "preaching about Hana for four years" as company Chairman Hasso Plattner put it in his Thursday keynote.

Big Data Finds 'Zombie Stores'

Jeff Bertolucci — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:51 EDT

Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA

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Not all business locations are ideal, of course, and it's not uncommon for retail chains to open, and later close, unprofitable stores. For instance, a company, intent on growing as quickly as possible, may expand into areas that aren't a good fit. Alternatively, a chain's merchandise may be behind the times or simply unappealing to shoppers.

Big Data Alchemy: Turn Info Into Money

Ajit Prabhu, John Lucker — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:06 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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There's an old aphorism that anything you're not using is costing you money. That's true of data, especially in light of the fact that collecting and storing it isn't cheap. It would make sense, then, for companies to try to wring more value out of the data resident in their systems.

Internet Of Things Wake-Up Call For Enterprises

Jeff Bertolucci — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:00 EDT

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In a little over a decade, the Internet of Things has evolved from academic concept to business reality, albeit one that's still very much a work in progress. Coined at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auto-ID Lab, the term originally referred to the concept of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging of objects in the physical world.

NASA Polar Ice Flyover: One Bumpy Big Data Project

Jeff Bertolucci — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:50 EDT

Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA

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Earth's polar regions aren't particularly hospitable to computers or humans. Building an advanced data management and storage system -- one that operates on bumpy flights in frigid weather, no less -- can be a formidable task.

MetLife Uses NoSQL For Customer Service Breakthrough

Doug Henschen — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:03 EDT

Big Data Analytics Masters Degrees: 20 Top Programs

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Just about every company with the combination of lots of customers and lots of points of customer interaction aspires to build the proverbial 360-degree customer view. All too many fail, with disparate systems and data being the usual culprit in failed attempts to gain a consolidated customer view.

Developing an integrated customer view has been on the wish list at insurance giant MetLife for at least 10 years, but it recently took a fresh approach to the challenge by choosing a NoSQL database as the platform for bringing together data from more than 70 separate administrative systems, claims systems and other data sources. It moved from pilot to rollout in 90 days -- breakneck speed in an industry used to measuring IT projects in months and years.

Did You Really Buy A Snowmobile? Big Data Knows

Jeff Bertolucci — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:06 EDT

Big Data's Surprising Uses: From Lady Gaga To CIA

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Have you ever charged something expensive -- and perhaps out of the ordinary for you -- only to have the transaction rejected by the bank? Not only do these "false positives" annoy consumers, they worry credit card issuers, who fear their customers might switch to a competitor's card.

Teradata to SAP: Our Memory Is Smarter

Doug Henschen — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:06 EDT

Teradata on Wednesday introduced a new in-memory database feature that it says offers a practical approach to exploiting random-access memory (RAM). The benefit, it says, is delivering the ultimate in query performance as needed without what it calls the "unnecessary and impractical" cost of an all-in-memory approach.

Teradata Intelligent Memory, the vendor's new database feature, is clearly being compared to SAP's Hana in-memory database. Teradata and SAP aren't exactly head-to-head competitors, with SAP primarily being an applications vendor and Teradata focusing exclusively on data warehousing. But with SAP thumping its chest about being the industry's fastest-growing database vendor, market leadership, mind share and industry buzz are clearly at stake.

Interop: Open Compute Project To Tackle Network Switching

David F. Carr — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:10 EDT

Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour

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Since Facebook kicked off the Open Compute Project by donating its overall data center design, the OCP Foundation has been chipping away at open sourcing designs for all of the critical components that go into the data center. Next up: network switches.

In a keynote speech at Interop, Facebook VP of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky reviewed two years of progress at expanding the scope of the project, which now includes open designs for server racks and cold storage designs based on how Facebook handles your old photos.

Big Data Firm Chronicles Your Online, Offline Lives

Jeff Bertolucci — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:45 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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There are traces of your existence everywhere, both online and off. Much of this disparate data, including your email addresses, credit rating, vehicle make and model, and whether you prefer gardening to scuba diving, is publicly available, but marketers may not always know where to find it.

In-Q-Tel Invests In Weather Data Analysis

Patience Wait — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:12 EDT

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U.S. intelligence agencies apply advanced analytics to their assessment of terrorist activities, foreign adversaries and other kinds of national security threats. Now they have access to big data on global weather, too.

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm for the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, said it has struck a deal with Weather Analytics, a company that specializes in climate and weather data, to develop new capacities for use in support of intelligence activities.

Cray Builds A Budget-Minded Supercomputer

Doug Henschen — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:06 EDT

10 Cool Products at Interop

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Well-known supercomputer vendor Cray introduced what it describes an "aggressively priced" product line on Tuesday aimed at an emerging class of customers delving into high-performance computing (HPC) perhaps for the first time.

Cray's top-end models used by large corporations, big government research centers and university labs require raised-floor data centers, liquid cooling, optical networking cables and run upwards of $10 million to $20 million for a complete system. The new Cray XC30-AC supercomputer uses many of the same components and software elements as those monsters, but it is air cooled, requires no optical cables and costs from $500,000 to $3 million. The target market is Fortune 100 to Fortune 1000 manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas firms, and smaller universities, government agencies and research labs that want to exploit supercomputing techniques.

Travel Stress Quantified Using Big Data

Ellis Booker — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:05 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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Millions of workers are on the roads, railways and tarmacs every day. But what's the impact on productivity when those trips go wrong, when business travelers experience stress and suffer indignities large and small?

Tivo Research Analytics Mines Big TV Data

Doug Henschen — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:35 EDT

Twentieth-century department store magnate John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

With big-data analysis, it's now possible to know which half is which. Tivo Research and Analytics (TRA) correlates data on television viewing habits to third-party purchasing data to show advertisers which ads are driving more sales, whether it's consumer packaged goods, automobiles or even prescription drugs. TRA is even exploring correlations among television advertising and online advertising so it can help marketers allocate cross-channel campaign spending.

Data Hoarding: How To Stop

Jeff Bertolucci — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:36 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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Data management is a never-ending struggle for enterprises, particularly when employees store work data in personal accounts on cloud storage services. This so-called data leakage, combined with the problem of data hoarding inside the enterprise firewall, can spell trouble for organizations, especially in legal matters.

How Foreign Names Trip Up Terrorism Databases

Jeff Bertolucci — Fri, 03 May 2013 09:56 EDT

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

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Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have many tools at their disposal to fight terrorism. But the most basic of mistakes, often the result of human error, can have deadly consequences. A suspected terrorist's name, for instance, may be spelled differently on various watch lists, an error that can make it difficult to identify and track a potentially dangerous individual.

MapR Brings Search To Hadoop

Doug Henschen — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:07 EDT

Last fall MapR set out to improve on HBase, Hadoop's built-in NoSQL database. On Wednesday it delivered on that promise and it announced a next move: integrating search capabilities with its M7 Hadoop distribution with partner LucidWorks.

With the latest MapR M7 release, available immediately, the company says it has delivered higher performance and easier administration for both Hadoop and HBase by forging its own path on certain aspects of Hadoop infrastructure and administration. Specifically, M7 does away with region servers, table splits and merges, and data compaction steps tied to standard Apache software. Instead it implements an architecture exclusive to MapR for snapshotting, high availability and system recovery.