Business Intelligence and Analytics Articles
In addition to StretchDB and AlwaysEncrypted, there are two more exciting features in the works for SQL Server 2016: dynamic data masking and row-level security. In the case of these two features, they'll be released first to the cloud platform (Azure SQL Database) and, later, to the on-premises version of SQL Server.
Posted December 02, 2015
The modern business landscape is a fast-moving, ever-changing, highly competitive environment. For companies to outpace the competition and build upon innovation, they must embrace a modern data architecture. It is necessary that this new architecture support today's new requirements such as mobile integration and advanced digital marketing.
Posted December 02, 2015
It's commonly asserted—and generally accepted—that the era of the "one-size-fits-all" database is over. We expect that enterprises will use a combination of database technologies to meet the distinct needs created by various application architectures.
Posted December 02, 2015
Database performance tuning is a complex but extremely important task. However, it can be difficult to effectively optimize databases when there are other "fires" to put out, limited resources, and an increasing number of databases to look after. But that doesn't mean it's impossible, especially with the right approach.
Posted December 02, 2015
It is often said that the only constant is change. For data executives and professionals, the coming year will only bring a lot more of it. Developments as diverse as cloud, big data, real time, NoSQL, analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to reshape enterprise data operations and opportunities as we know them. Here are 16 trends that will shape the enterprise data landscape in 2016.
Posted December 02, 2015
There's no question that the pace of data movement has quickened dramatically in recent years. This calls for new strategies for integrating data at the speed of business. That is the challenge as companies increasingly rely on data analytics in their decision making. In a new survey, a majority of managers and professionals (57%) state their business leaders now rely heavily on analytics in their day-to-day decision making. The survey, covering 303 data managers and professionals and conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., finds that organizations are employing a range of new strategies and approaches to improve the speed of data delivery and integration. The survey, among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), and sponsored by Oracle, included respondents from organizations of all sizes and across various industries.
Posted December 02, 2015
Oracle has introduced new innovations within the Oracle Marketing Cloud to help marketers deliver a more consistent customer experience across paid, owned and earned media. The improvements are aimed at helping marketers to orchestrate relevant mobile interactions for consumers and salespeople, clearly attribute revenue to marketing activities and optimize the experience for individual customers.
Posted December 02, 2015
TeamQuest, an IT capacity planning and management solutions vendor, is acquiring PureShare, a provider of business value dashboards. According to TeamQuest, the acquisition will enable IT organizations to better predict the health and risk of their operations while providing IT and business leadership with actionable information they need to make informed decisions.
Posted December 01, 2015
HPE and Microsoft have expanded their partnership with new innovation in hybrid cloud computing through Microsoft Azure, HPE infrastructure and services, and new program offerings. Microsoft Azure has been designated a preferred public cloud partner for HPE customers and HPE will serve as a preferred partner in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft's hybrid cloud offerings.
Posted December 01, 2015
Datameer, a provider of a big data analytics platform, has announced a range of product enhancements, including the availability of Datameer Enterprise in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace via Microsoft HDInsight, a new Spark connector, and native support for Amazon Redshift and updated support for leading Hadoop distributions.
Posted December 01, 2015
Vormetric is joining the Hortonworks Technology partner program, promising users a comprehensive enterprise solution that is made for big data environments and optimizes performance. The advantage for the customers is that they will be able to use the Vormetric solution across their entire infrastructure, said Ashvin Kamaraju, vice president of product development and partner management at Vormetric. "What our customers like is for us to be the provider of all the data security solutions across their entire enterprise."
Posted December 01, 2015
Melissa Data, a provider of global data quality solutions, has announced that its address verification engine, Address Object, has been certified by Canada Post's Software Evaluation and Recognition Program (SERP) to provide complete, consistent, and valid Canadian addresses. Address Object is available as a multiplatform API, cloud service, or directly integrated with major CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com and data integration platforms including Pentaho and Microsoft SQL ServerIntegration Services.
Posted November 24, 2015
Sisense is improving its flagship platform to advance its analytics capabilities and the platform's ability to integrate across the business analytics ecosystem. A key advancement in Sisense version 6 is the utilization of In-Chip analytics to improve business users' access to advanced analytics on low-cost, commodity machines without the need for special data warehouse tools or dedicated IT staff. "There's no reason why in 2015 a business user needs to go to a math genius to get their equation," said Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense.
Posted November 24, 2015
CA Technologies announced new product releases in its identity-centric security portfolio that protect and enable the hybrid enterprise, spanning cloud, distributed, mobile, and mainframe. A new release of CA Privileged Access Manager helps control privileged user access to dynamic VMware NSX environments. Updates to CA Identity Suite help simplify identity governance for all users, and a new product, CA Data Content Discovery, helps address compliance demands by discovering and classifying mainframe data.
Posted November 24, 2015
OpenText, a provider of enterprise information management solutions, outlined the new features that will be part of it next releases of its flagship OpenText EIM offerings, with features that support deployments on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments.
Posted November 23, 2015
IBM and several fellow OpenPOWER Foundation members revealed new technologies, collaborations and developer resources to enable clients to more deeply and more rapidly analyze data. The new offerings center on the tight integration of IBM's open and licensable POWER processors with accelerators, dedicated high performance processors that can be optimized for computationally intensive software code.
Posted November 23, 2015
IBM and Xilinx, Inc., a provider of data center efficiency tools, announced a multi-year strategic collaboration to enable higher performance and energy-efficient data center applications through Xilinx FPGA-enabled workload acceleration on IBM POWER-based systems. IBM and Xilinx, through a private signed agreement and collaboration enabled by the OpenPOWER Foundation, are teaming to develop open acceleration infrastructures, software and middleware to address emerging applications such as machine learning, network functions virtualization, genomics, high performance computing and big data analytics.
Posted November 23, 2015
Hadoop distribution provider Cloudera has introduced Cloudera Enterprise 5.5, including Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, a new product targeted at helping organizations improve big data workload performance and efficiency. Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, now in beta, is expected to be generally available in 2016. The new release of Cloudera Enterprise has three main areas of focus, according to Anupam Singh, head of data management at Cloudera.
Posted November 19, 2015
SAP SE is offering the option to run the SAP Business One Cloud solution powered by the SAP HANA platform at data centers run by SAP, providing an end-to-end SAP-branded experience. Partners will now have three deployment options for the subscription-based offering of SAP Business One Cloud, including running in a partner's private hosted cloud, in a cloud infrastructure hosted by a third party, or in data centers run by SAP. Taking advantage of this offer, says SAP, will allow partners to help SME (small and midsize enterprise) customers gain the benefit of streamlined operations. The offering will be available first in North America, with expansion planned to Europe and Asia in 2016.
Posted November 18, 2015
Almost every commercial endeavor and, indeed, almost every human undertaking, has software at its core. Yet, with software at the core of so much of our society, it's surprising to realize it's getting harder and harder to actually make a living selling software. In his recent book, "The Software Paradox," Stephen O'Grady - co-founder of analyst firm RedMonk - provides a cohesive and persuasive analysis of what those of us in the software business have been experiencing for several years - it's getting increasingly difficult to generate revenues selling "shrink-wrapped" software.
Posted November 18, 2015
A new cloud-based knowledge management solution within the Oracle Service Cloud is has been launched to help organizations deliver a better customer experience, while reducing overall customer support costs. Oracle Knowledge Advanced cloud is fully integrated into Oracle Service Cloud, and is aimed at helping organizations to create and refine their knowledge assets to deliver a seamless cross-channel customer experience in 33 languages for both end customers and contact center agents.
Posted November 18, 2015
Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Business Intelligence 12c (BI 12c), which provides new capbilities for blending and visually analyzing any data in an enterprise-scale analytics platform. Oracle BI 12c provides four key areas of enhancement.
Posted November 18, 2015
What does it take to have an always-on organization? While an impressive array of technology exists to deliver data on a real-time, continuous basis, even those organizations with multiple redundancies built into their systems and networks still face challenges keeping up.
Posted November 18, 2015
The PASS Summit 2015, the largest conference in the Microsoft SQL Server world, was held in October in Seattle, WA. The event provided a look at key initiatives that Microsoft's SQL Server group has been working on and a glimpse of what's ahead for the future.
Posted November 18, 2015
Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. has completed the acquisition of Syncsort. "Our organic product investments and related software acquisitions over the last couple of years have been singularly focused on one of the most important secular growth opportunities in the technology industry today: demand for software that liberates data and existing budgets for use in advanced machine learning and business intelligence systems," said Lonne Jaffe, CEO of Syncsort.
Posted November 18, 2015
TIBCO is introducing two tools that extend beyond automation and into the realm of digitalizing businesses with the release of TIBCO Simplr and TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM 4.0. "This is our first focus on the everyday user to help people build processes to automate some of the routine things they might do," said Brad Topliff, director of product marketing at TIBCO.
Posted November 17, 2015
Alpine Data has announced the general availability of the Alpine Custom Operator Framework, a methodology for developing custom algorithms that can be plugged into Alpine's parallel machine learning engine. Complementing Alpine Touchpoints, the Custom Operator Framework enables data science and business analyst teams to create, manage and distribute frequently-requested analytic assets to business users directly into their existing activities and workflows.
Posted November 17, 2015
With the Hadoop ecosystem expanding rapidly, Hortonworks' Shaun Connolly recently discussed how Hadoop and related technologies are growing and being used, as well as the factors for a successful deployment.
Posted November 13, 2015
A typical organization loses about 5% of its revenues to fraud each year. The total cost of non-health insurance fraud in the U.S. is estimated to be more than $40 billion per year. These numbers stress the importance and need of finding sophisticated tools to both detect and prevent fraud. Big data and analytics offer a new valuable toolkit in the fight against fraud.
Posted November 13, 2015
"Caveat emptor" is Latin for "Let the buyer beware." In the realm of the modern information technology cloud, this sage advice rings especially true.
Posted November 13, 2015
With increased demand for mass customization and personalization, the emergence of Web 2.0, and one-to-one marketing, and the need for better risk management and timely fraud detection, the pressure is on for organizations to improve their ability to extract, understand, and exploit analytical patterns of customer behavior and strategic intelligence.
Posted November 12, 2015
At Oracle OpenWorld each year, there are significant announcements about Oracle products and insight provided on key areas of focus for the future. Melissa English, president of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), recently reflected on some of the key developments at the 2015 OpenWorld conference and their relevance for OAUG members. In particular, said English, "Oracle's announcements about continuing to support on-premises apps for the next 10 years and beyond are significant."
Posted November 12, 2015
Dell expanded its PowerEdge 13th generation servers with the introduction of four new entry-level servers that provide greater performance, flexibility and efficiency for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The latest Dell PowerEdge servers are designed to address the top IT pain points of SMBs which Dell says are performance, hardware capacity, and IT complexity. The new Dell PowerEdge servers include the PowerEdge R330 and R230 rack servers and the PowerEdge T330 and T130 tower servers.
Posted November 11, 2015
Business intelligence provider Looker is releasing a series of Looker Blocks for Google BigQuery that are intended to make it easy to build an organization-wide data analytics platform. "What Looker is all about is creating a new experience for business users in these new database worlds," said Frank Bien, Looker CEO. "Looker empowers the data team to curate a new kind of experience on these new data infrastructures and then allows the business people to explore that data and discover on a much larger scale across an organization so they can make better decisions."
Posted November 10, 2015
Informatica has announced a new big data management solution called Informatica Big Data Management that brings together big data Integration, big data quality and governance, and big data security in a single integrated solution. According to the vendor, while more than 67% of enterprises see the big opportunity in big data, the majority of big data projects fail. The new Informatica solution aims to help organizations more effectively overcome the data management challenges that are often at the root of big data project failures. In addition, Informatica Big Data Management is also designed to reduce the need for hand-coding and big data skill sets that are expensive and hard to come by.
Posted November 10, 2015
Franz, Inc., an early innovator in artificial intelligence (AI) and a supplier of semantic graph database technology, is releasing Gruff v6.0, the company's graph visualization software for exploring and discovering connections within data. Gruff provides novice users and graph experts with the ability to visually build queries and visualize connections between data without writing code, which speeds discovery and enhances the ability to uncover hidden connections within data.
Posted November 10, 2015
SIOS Technology Corp. is today releasing an improved version of SIOS iQ machine learning analytics software with new features that deliver accuracy and precision in performance root cause analysis for VMware environments. This new release also includes dashboard enhancements for improved usability and a graphical topological impact view enabling faster identification and resolution of issues.
Posted November 10, 2015
Splunk, which provides operational intelligence, is making major changes to its key platforms, delivering out-of-the-box capabilities driven by machine learning and advanced analytics to help detect cyberattacks and insider threats. "We've significantly improved the ability for our customers to both detect and respond to breaches," said Robert Ma, Splunk senior director of security markets.
Posted November 10, 2015
There are many different ways to look at database administration. It can be done by task, by discipline, by DBMS, by server, and so on. But one useful way to look at database administration is in terms of the type of support being delivered to applications. You can paint a broad brush stroke across the duties of the DBA and divide them into two categories: those that support development work and those that support the production systems.
Posted November 09, 2015
The DBA's role is becoming increasingly complex and now often involves managing data both on premise and in the cloud, and in a variety of database management systems including not only traditional relational systems such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and others, but also new open source and NoSQL technologies, according to Gerardo Dada, vice president of product marketing, at SolarWinds.
Posted November 09, 2015
Microsoft and Linux software provider Red Hat have announced a partnership to provide Red Hat solutions on the Microsoft Azure cloud service. Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition, Microsoft and Red Hat are also working together to address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.
Posted November 04, 2015
Oracle has announced that the new Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5-8, the latest in the X5 family of engineered systems which integrate hardware and software, is now available. The new Exadata X5-8 offers up to 576 CPU cores, more than 1.3 petabytes of disk storage or 180 terabytes of PCIe flash, and up to 24 terabytes of memory. The Oracle Exadata X5-8 is the new companion model to Oracle Exadata X5-2 and incorporates the same storage and networking capabilities of Oracle Exadata X5-2, which was announced in January 2015.
Posted November 04, 2015
Organizations are getting squeezed, said Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO, in his Monday morning keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2015. They have old infrastructure; there is the need for innovation but also great pressure to do things such as increase security and adhere to governance mandates which are not innovative; and also pressure to keep costs flat, without increasing IT costs. "This is why the cloud is such a big deal," said Hurd, sharing his list of top 5 predictions for 2025.
Posted November 04, 2015
To kick off Oracle Open World 2015, Oracle's annual user conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison detailed the steps that led Oracle be positioned in "every layer of the cloud." Ellison outlined the top design goals for the company in all three layers of the cloud - SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. These are cost, reliability, performance, standards, compatibility - as well as security, which he said is increasingly becoming a more critical concern.
Posted November 04, 2015
Dell is releasing a free version of its Statistica advanced analytics software to all U.S. college students and professors, helping to boost interest in and preparedness for data analytics careers. "Today's organizations, including institutions of higher education, depend on advanced technologies in security, data analytics and mobility to stay ahead of student and faculty needs," said Jon Phillips, managing director of worldwide education strategy at Dell.
Posted November 03, 2015