Blogs
I was speaking at a conference last week (Heliview BI, in Holland) and my theme, as is pretty usual now, was the place of the data warehouse in a big data strategy. I had a packed room, but I suspect, it was the title not my reputation that filled it. It went well, as it usually does. I think that’s because I pitch it from the business benefit angle and spend more time on the use cases, than the technology.
The term "appliance" is liberally used by many vendors in the big data space these days. It seems that almost everyone has latched onto the term and it is being used not only to define data warehousing and analytic product offerings, but also to subtly (or not so subtly in some cases) set customer expectations about the underlying ease of deployment and ongoing cost of ownership associated with the product.
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These days, it’s hard to find a business conference or read a publication that doesn’t talk about big data. Even the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, featured more than 40 presentations on this hot technology. Because of all the recent talk, many people think big data is new. While it’s true that big data is suddenly gaining more attention, we at IBM have been investing in this space for many years, and are confident that we have the strongest strategy and deepest solution offering on the market. Now, an independent research firm has validated our belief.
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A number of Teradata customers have moved some or all of their data and analytic applications to IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances. The reasons these customers give for their move invariably include:
- Time to value
- Agility and the ability to grow with new workloads
- Reducing their cost of ongoing maintenance
- Improving query performance – particularly for complex analytics and ad-hoc environments as data volumes grow.
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Is 2012 the year of Agile Analytics? Recent publications show growing interest in the application of Agile methods to analytics:
- Ken Collier, an Agile pioneer, tackles analytics in his aptly named new book Agile Analytics.Â
- A quick Google search surfaces a number of recent blogs and articles.
- Curt Monash recently published an excellent two-part blog on the subject.
In talking to customers, analysts and partners at the National Retail Federation “Big Show” last week, it was clear to me that retailers are trying to find the “holy grail” in the cross-channel retailing environment that offers “one view of the customer across all channels.” Power has shifted to consumers as shoppers use multiple devices to price-compare and use the store as a place that offers them convenience, instant access and price efficiency, but not much more. Loyalty seems to be a thing of the past.
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Still NOT Positioned For Analytics
Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, originally announced in October 2011, is now officially for sale and includes the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop. Despite the inclusion of Cloudera, Oracle's position on Hadoop remains fundamentally different than IBM. IBM embraces Hadoop for all use cases, especially as a platform for analytics. Oracle continues to position Hadoop and their Big Data Appliance strictly as a platform to acquire and transform unstructured data to be loaded into Oracle database for analysis.
2011 finished with the European leg of the 2011 Global Netezza Roadshow. We shared product updates, customer case studies and just got together with our community in Paris, London, Milan and Frankfurt. A year ago I wrote about a great restaurant in Milan that I visited when I was there for the Netezza roadshow in 2010 and, true to form, I ate well there on this trip too - especially the place that has a chocolate board as well as a cheese board!
Cutting costs and improving process efficiencies are common paths businesses take to boosting their bottom line. The difficultly of driving top line revenues makes this a road less traveled. IBM Netezza customers are showing the way - use advanced analytics on big data to grow top line revenues. This approach unifies sometimes disparate parts of organizations - IT, sales, marketing, operations, and finance - to net out significant opportunities and revenue lift for their business.
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Architecting Big Data Solutions Series
"Our real secret sauce is to take our analytical skills and capabilities and blend that with our offerings around Big Data technologies to execute more effective marketing for our clients", says Russ Pearlman, CTO of Merkle Inc.
We are seeing a growing trend, especially in the Digital Media space, where the most successful and innovative organizations claim that their key to success lies in their unique ability to marry complex analytics with Big Data know-how. For example, Zynga, the hottest social gaming company in today's market, claim that their "secret sauce is that they are really an analytics company masquerading as a games company".
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