DataSift Intro

DataSift, an enterprise social data company, has added Instagram, Facebook Page and Google+ data to its managed data offering, and partnered with analytics and visualization vendor Tableau on data integration.

Datasift is now offering aggregate data of these popular sites through their public developer interfaces, and companies will be able filter relevant data from them for behavior and sentiment insights. Large companies sometimes have dozens and dozens of Facebook Pages across different departments, and DataSift will allow them all to be viewed in one stream, for example.

Mining sentiment from social media with DataSift includes features like extracting topics and sentiment around what fans are posting on those fan pages. Additionally, businesses can figure how deftly their content is picking up new fans, a good sign it is finding new customers.

The attached diagram displays the data integration from outside the enterprise with business data for maximum insight.

IBM 10gen Collaboration

IBM and 10gen, the MongoDB company, have announced they are collaborating on a database development standard to push MongoDB as a core NoSQL database for enterprises building web and mobile apps.

Speaking at a press event at the IBM Innovate 2013 conference here, Matt Asay, vice president of business development and corporate strategy at 10gen, said: “IBM embraces open source communities. And IBM is working with 10gen in establishing MongoDB as an industry standard for NoSQL databases. But this by no means indicates that IBM will be diminishing its investment in its own proprietary databases.” Asay was quick to note that he was not trying to speak for IBM.

The identification of a standard NoSQL database is important because millions of developers designing web and mobile apps are using popular NoSQL database technology like MongoDB, and companies need the tools to combine data from these new apps with enterprise databases like IBM’s DB2 that power organizations of all sizes today. By embracing MongoDB IBM is providing mobile developers with the ability to tap into critical data managed by DB2 systems and enable organizations to extend their business through compelling enterprise apps.

Netflix BigData

Netflix is the big Kahuna of a Web media businesses, with 33 million subscribers in more than 40 countries. As Netflix's "watch now" streaming service has grown, the company has had to rethink its data and storage strategies to cope with ballooning workloads managed in the cloud.

Today, the company is nearly complete in its migration from Oracle to the NoSQL database Cassandra, improving availability and essentially eliminating downtime incurred by database schema changes.

Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, using the Oracle database as the back end. In 2010, Netflix began moving its data to Amazon Web Services. The current step is to replace its Oracle database with Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database known for its scalability and enterprise-grade reliability.

With billions of reads and writes daily, Netflix relies on NoSQL database Cassandra to replace a legacy Oracle deployment.

Alteryx

Business intelligence firm Alteryx has debuted Project Edition, an analytics package it has dubbed instant analytics, the kind to be deployed for a specific project and one that doesn't require assistance from IT to run.

Project Edition, as the name implies, is a scaled down version of the Alteryx Strategic Analycis 8.5 system, and the company has released it in the hopes of exposing a wider customer base to the full paid version. Project Edition, while free to use, is limited because it only allows data to be run a handful of times for a given purpose.

Data can come from a variety of sources like Excel, text files, data warehouses, cloud apps, Hadoop or social media, and can be integrated and cleansed by Alteryx. This single analytics workflow is meant to help teams crunch data for particluar assignment even if they don't have any coding or programming skills. Once the data is analyzed, it can be presented in reports, data files or Tableau, a data visualization tool.

BigData Summit

Big data. It just keeps getting bigger. Why? Because top management’s attention is laser-focused on big data as the solution to many corporate problems.  More actions at CIO Big Data summit at New York on first week of May'13.

Gartner Sales Performance Analyst Patrick Stakenas. “There’s no question that big data is the biggest trend in business intelligence, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. But it’s not just an IT issue. It’s a management issue. Relying too much on big data analytics risks losing the personal approach to selling.”

The huge stores of data that companies have accumulated haven’t added true value to the enterprise yet, because data requires context in order to be useful. Context includes a clearly articulated business strategy for using the data, an understanding of competitive shifts, an understanding of the market’s perceptions about your company and your products, and much, much more.

Gartner’s Laney says, for example, that social media is a great source of data and information about customers, but it can cause real problems for executives unless it’s put into context.

Even after all the data is collected and analyzed, there’s still one more pitfall to look for, adds Adam Sarner, Gartner’s big data and CRM analyst. “The successful big data project isn’t about collecting massive amounts of this data,” Sarner says. “It’s about making the right information accessible and action-oriented for the company and the customer for core CRM.”

Big Data Splunk

The initial focus of 'big data' has been about its increasing volume, velocity and variety — the "three Vs" — with little mention of real world application. Now is the time to get down to business.

Splunk is the platform for machine data. It’s the easy, fast and resilient way to collect, analyze and secure the massive streams of machine data generated by your IT systems and technology infrastructure—whether it’s physical, virtual or in the cloud.

Splunk software collects machine data securely and reliably from wherever it’s generated. It stores and indexes the data in real time in a centralized location and protects it with role-based access controls. Splunk lets you search, monitor, report and analyze your real-time and historical data

451 Research, and three "real world" case studies of Splunk customers handling the variety and velocity of their ever increasing unstructured data. 451 Research believes that in order to deliver value from 'big data', businesses need to look beyond the nature of the data and re-assess the technologies, processes and policies they use to engage with that data

Oracle Big Data

Enterprise systems have long been designed around capturing, managing and analyzing business transactions e.g. marketing, sales, support activities etc. However, lately with the evolution of automation and Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, status updates, tweets etc. there has been an explosive growth in the arena of machine and consumer generated data. Defined as “Big Data”, this data is characterized by attributes like volume, variety, velocity and complexity and essentially represents machine and consumer interactions

Big data analytics lifecycle includes steps like acquire, organize and analyze. The analytics process starts with data acquisition. The structure and content of big data can’t be known upfront and is subject to change in-flight so the data acquisition systems have to be designed for flexibility and variability; no predefined data structures, dynamic structures are a norm. The organization step entails moving the data in well defined structures so relationships can be established and the data across sources can be combined to get a complete picture.

Oracle offers the broadest and most integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyzes them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Attached diagram helps you to understand how Oracle acquire, organize, and analyze your big data.