Commoditizing Data Science
My ongoing conversations with several people continue to reaffirm my belief that Data Science is still perceived to be a sacred discipline and data scientists are perceived to be highly skilled statisticians who walk around wearing white lab coats. The best data scientists are not the ones who know the most about data but they [...]
Discussing Data Markets in New York City
As part of GigaOM’s Structure:Data Conference (taking place in New York City on 20-21 March), Jo Maitland and I are going to host a Mapping Session on Data Marketplaces. What are they, what are they doing, why do they matter, and how does their future look? The session is intended to be highly interactive, so attendees [...]
SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term
I spent a lot of time last year talking with vendors about big data and it’s ramifications for both the tech industry and the economy at large. Often these conversations centered around one or another vendor’s use of the big data term as the buzzword de jour, regardless of whether anything they do even vaguely [...]
A Journey From SQL to NoSQL to NewSQL
Two years back I wrote that the primary challenge with NoSQL is that it’s not SQL. SQL has played a huge rule in making relational databases popular for the last forty years or so. Whenever the developers wanted to design an(y) application they put an …
Big Data as Core, Big Data as Context, and Big Data as Buzzword Bingo
It’s neither particularly newsworthy nor insightful to suggest that ‘Big Data’ gets everywhere these days, but two recent items reminded me of the gulf between credible execution of a big data play and the more questionable tacking of the big data meme onto an otherwise useful product. Christmas is coming. Which means skating, and pantomimes [...]
Objectively Inconsistent
During his recent visit to the office of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos said, “to be consistently objective, one has to be objectively inconsistent.” I find this perspective very refreshing that is applicable to all things and all disciplines in life beyond just product design. As a product designer you need to have a series of [...]
‘Autonomy Inside’ matters at Hewlett Packard
The Hewlett Packard marketing machine was busy last week, assuring the world that the company’s £7.1bn ($11.7bn) acquisition of Autonomy still made sense despite an eye-watering financial write down and unseemly public squabbling with the Cambridge company’s former management. HP CEO Meg Whitman used her keynote at HP Discover in Frankfurt to assert that the [...]
On Organizations’ Real Requirements Around BigData
Every time another vendor takes the “big data” moniker and applies it to some legacy system a cat somewhere on the internet dies. Like “cloud” a couple of years ago, big data has become the term de jour – and vendors seem to think that simply using it will give them some magic power to [...]
Why CloudFoundry Spin Off Is Interesting
The rumors are true with VMware publicly announcing that CloudFoundry will be spun off as a separate organization along with EMC’s Greenplum and VMware’s vFabric. This unit will be headed by Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware. This leaves VMware to focus on their Software Defined DataCenter initiative which they announced during last VMworld. I [...]
Follow Up Post – Continuuity, the PaaS for Big Data (and a $10M Series A)
When Continuuity came out of stealth recently I was a little dismissive of a press release that was full of buzzwords and lacking significant details about what they’re actually doing. To their credit the Continuuity team reached out to me and spent some time talking about what they’re seeing in the marketplace and why they [...]
Big Data : In Election And In Business Creates Big Impact
The US Election results and the process have created worldwide impact. Not only it was noticed for electing someone for arguably the most powerful office in the world, it brings along with it many innovations and advances. In 2008, when Mr. Obama won the elections for the first time, it was very clear that technology [...]
Conference Report: Workday Rising
Last week I attended the analyst event organized along with Workday Rising 2012 conference. Workday Rising is Workday’s (previous CloudAve coverage)(Disclosure: Workday is the sponsor of CloudAve and this is my own personal opinion but they paid for my travel and stay) user conference and it was their attempt to interact closely with their customers [...]
Continuuity Launches Big Data Application Fabric–Warning: Buzzwords Abound
Coming out of stealth today at Strata and Hadoop World is Continuuity, a company that is looking to position itself within the PaaS landscape as it gives organizations the ability to build, deploy and scale big data apps. All of which sounds dangerously like buzzword heaven so it’s worth taking a look at what Continuuity [...]
Analytics-first Enterprise Applications
This is the story of Tim Zimmer who has been working as a technician for one of the large appliance store chains. His job is to attend service calls for washers and dryers. He has seen a lot in his life; a lot has changed but a few things have stayed t…
Tesco uses data for more than just loyalty cards
Tesco. Poster-child of the data-driven retail experience, thanks to its loyalty card and early work with DunnHumby. But Tom Hebbert didn’t talk about that. Instead, he focused on their supply chain work. Rough notes from the session follow. Big Data projects deliver huge returns at Tesco; improving promotions to ensure 30% fewer gaps on shelves, [...]
