Infrastructure Solutions Protect Against Big Data Woes

The competition in the software solution industry is increasing, so it is time for developers to provide or step aside. Motivated developers are upgrading and improving the services they offer in order to compensate for growing consumer demands. Others are making improvements and coming up with creative marketing plans, such as Oracle’s Big Data dooms day prophecy in the New York Times’ article “Oracle: Big Business Has Big Data Woes”

It is no surprise that the increasing data is causing a substantial growth in storage needs:

Businesses are growing their data storage by 35 percent to 40 percent a year which are likely to rise with the increasing number of data-collecting sensors and captured Web clicks.

Ironically, Oracles warnings of Big Data woe lead into a pitch for their new product:

New data storage technologies, like the one Oracle is offering will shrink data storage by close to 90 percent. And once the data is stored, Oracle’s analysis software will be deployed to improve how businesses find and interact with customers.

Big Data is big business and the hardest decision companies are making now is which information intelligence platform to utilize. Polyspot is a well-established provider that developed an infrastructure solution that keeps increasing amounts of data centralized and divvied out through proper channels, increasing efficiency and generating ROI. Developers with a proven record in information management like this will protect entrepreneurs against Oracle’s prophecy of Big Data woes.

Jennifer Shockley, October 11, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Trifacta Talks a Good Game but Information Intelligence Achieves Results

There is a plethora of intelligent software providers all claiming to simplify Big Data and Trifacta just joined the ranks. What makes this group different than all the rest? Overall, not much.

Trifacta is a group of computer scientists that united, formed a company and started re-evaluating the way humans, software and data interact. Now they are preparing for a big release that will drastically simplify Big Data according to TechCrunch’s article“Accel Partners Big Data Fund Invests $4.3 Million In Trifacta”.  

The newly formed Trifacta is creating a flexible interface that functions with a variety of platforms like Hadoop clusters and relational Databases:

The user will be able to pull a data set, or perhaps just a sample of it, into memory and use Trifacta to explore the through an interface that includes different ways of visualizing the data. The application will suggest different operations you might want to perform and there will previews of what the effects of a particular operation might be. Once you’ve decided on the operations you want to perform, the code or queries are generated.

Businesses need reliable software with a flexible platform that can handle data collection with information distribution and Trifacta talks a good game. However, there are well established information management providers that have been delegating Big Data solutions for a decade. Entrepreneurs that use proven information intelligence software with the latest in semantic tools achieve relevant results, increasing both efficiency and ROI.

Jennifer Shockley, October 10, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Users Empowered by Big Data Solutions with an Insight Enabling Infrastructure

Integrating Big Data into your current business plan can be tricky, so Harvard Business Review's article “To Succeed with Big Data, Start Small” suggests not looking at the overall mass of data, but instead targeting smaller clusters to feel out the potential. Entrepreneurs with realistic expectations and the right tools will be capable of acquiring valuable information.

They suggest three steps for testing Big Data potential:

1. Define a few relatively simple analytics that won't take much time or data to run.                  

2. Instead of setting up formal processes to capture, process, and analyze all of the data all of the time, capture some of the data in a one-off fashion.                                                                 

3. Turn analytic professionals loose on the data. They are used to dealing with raw data    in an unfriendly format.

The full effort will now be less risky because data is better understood and the value is partially proven.

Timidly skimming the Big Data surface sounds cost effective but the time and efforts needed to decipher data by an analytics team could quickly eliminate initial savings. Businesses would benefit more from a Big Data solution that specializes in storing and breaking down insights and opportunities from Big Data using insight enabling infrastructures. Intelligent software like this empowers the user with a friendly interface and customizable features which can increase company efficiency and generate ROI.  

Jennifer Shockley, October 10, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Consumerization of IT Recieves New Label While Software Itself Remains Focused on Increasing Efficiency

Developers are invested in the idea of bringing productivity and efficiency to everyday work tasks. Through innovative apps, agile information management technologies, infrastructure components and more, software is smoothing out the creases in formerly stodgy business practices. The article "Building For the Enterprise – The Zero Overhead Principle" shows this to be the case and points to a corresponding and underlying ideology that has arisen in the enterprise: the Zero Overhead Principle.

The Zero Overhead Principle says that no feature may add training costs to the user. Similarly, this idea has essentially been discussed previously as the consumerization of IT.

The article describes the rationale behind this movement:

The real challenge for analysts is that they are already overloaded and tend to ignore additional tools that require training (remember these guys have real time pressure). So we had to adopt a different mindset. Our products had to work naturally with the analysts’ work styles. Period. That’s the Zero Overhead Principle. Put another way, our products had to teach the user as they went along. In essence, we were really just building enterprise products with a consumer mindset.

The emphasis on the user experience has greatly aided productivity for enterprise users, but what has helped even more are out-of-the-box information management solutions such as Information at Work from PolySpot.

Megan Feil, October 10, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Innovative Technology Creates Single Point of Access for Enterprise Information on Mobile and Traditional Devices

Internal enterprise users may need to begin thinking more selectively about what mobile features and functions they need to use on a regular basis. IT does not have an unlimited amount of time and resources to devote to developing and implementing apps for everything or access to everything. An important lesson on this topic was learned and shared in the recent article, "Cisco: Balancing Requests and Reality in Enterprise Mobile Video."

Mark Sherwood, senior director of Cisco's emerging technology IT group told Streaming Media:

Everybody says 'I absolutely want video on my smartphone. I want it on my tablet.' What we see is that with video-on-demand, people who are using these devices, it's a fairly short video, two, three minutes. For streaming events, there's a lot of people who had requested it, they say 'I absolutely want to watch a company meeting on a device like this.' So, we end up doing some proof of concepts, and we'll put out an HLS streaming server, and there's not that much usage on it. People try it for a few minutes and it's really small.

When it comes to making new apps and mobile functions available to users in the enterprise, IT does not have an unlimited budget. For this reason, it is important that IT departments concentrate on building up a connected infrastructure that ensures accessibility to enterprise information for users who need it.

Megan Feil, October 9, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext