Blogs
Game-changing analytics applications don't spring spontaneously from bare earth. You must plant the seeds through continuing investments in applied data science and, of course, in the big data analytics platforms and tools that bring it all to fruition.
If there’s more and more data arriving and time isn’t expandingi, then data must be arriving at greater and greater velocity.
In my last post I talked about Variety in the Volume, Variety, Velocity triumvirate. There’s more to be said about that, but first I’d like to take a run at Velocity. We’ve got used to the idea that you load stuff into a database (or other data store) then you take a look at it. That’s just too slow for lots of operational decision making processes.  And if you think about it, as the volume of data available increases the bar is constantly rising on real-time analysis. But for many kinds of decisions, you just need the data that comes with the event you want to decide about: is this a fraudulent transaction? Was this call dropped?
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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurologic disorder that afflicts many in the primes of their lives. The biomedical research community has ramped up its use of big data analytics to illuminate the myriad factors that contribute to the onset and progression of MS.
On April 26, IBM announced that the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo is using tools from our Netezza portfolio and from our big data analytics business partner, Revolution Analytics, for their ongoing MS research initiative. We have recently published blogs on the effort, by Steve Hamm, Mike Kearney, and yours truly.
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The human condition is an unfathomable mystery, a complex stew of biological, genetic, behavioral, cultural, environmental, psychological, and spiritual factors.
But fathom it we must. When our personal condition stumbles from wellness to illness, we will use any resources at our disposal, especially the full repertoire of modern healthcare, to restore it. When our health issue is congenital, we'll use explore all options that might help us live as close to a normal life as we can. At the very least, we want all the facts and diagnostic tools that might help us understand what's ailing us and what, if anything, we can do about it.
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Further to news of SUNY’s exploration of big data to understand possible causes of multiple sclerosis, I spoke with David Smith, VP of Marketing at Revolution Analytics, for a briefing on some advantages of R for analysis of large data sets.
If this was a start-up, that would be good for at least $100M...
Analytics. Big Data. At a recent conference I attended, one of the keynote speakers stated that start-ups with “Analytics” in their business description are getting about two times the average valuation by the venture capital community, but those that combine “Analytics” and “Big Data” are getting about ten times the valuation. Netezza is no longer a start-up - we at Netezza have been helping customers with analytics and big data since our beginnings over ten years ago. And then there was that little matter of our acquisition by IBM, itself at a pretty healthy valuation. There isn’t really anything new about big data but the name. Companies have had to deal with larger amounts of data, more types of data, and faster generated or changing data since data has existed. Now because the term has gone viral, all the data management vendors are trying to wedge it into every press release and all their social media posts to catch the search engines. (Vendors in other segments seem to be looking for ways to get in on that game. Maybe we’ll see Kellogg’s “Big Data Crunch” on our supermarket shelves soon.)
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Big data is not just about scaling your data analytics processing platforms to keep up with the onslaught of new information. Just as important, big data is about bringing together your best and brightest minds and giving them the tools they need to interactively and collaboratively explore rich information sets.
We'll start from the very beginning. It's a very good place to start...
Big data is all about Velocity, Variety and Volume, and the greatest of these is Variety. At least it causes the greatest misunderstanding.
The planet is a huge place to optimize. Often, it's not clear, in a world divided among squabbling nations, where we should start.
People-centric lifestyles are paramount. You should begin by making your own corner of the planet more livable. As the world rapidly urbanizes, the demand for Smarter Cities will intensify. With population pressures, resource constraints, and aging infrastructures, urban areas will struggle to provide well-run environments where people might want to settle and businesses to invest.
Monty Python’s Mr Gumby was anatomically on the money when he exclaimed “my brain hurts”. Our brains and bodies communicate via long axons that run from gray matter through our spinal cords. Neural communication is two way – when we cut a finger or knock a shin messages charge across a network of nerves to reach our brains, and it’s from here that feelings of physical hurt emanate. Communicating bodily damage is just one type of bi-directional traffic flowing between our brains and spinal cords; this network’s vital importance becomes devastating obvious when it fails.
