Brian Christian, writing for Venture Beat, dives into the significant competitive advantages and levels of insight companies can obtain by embracing Big Data in general and using Hadoop in specific. With an elephant-sized caveat. While Hadoop is an open-source platform, the process of developing and deploying it is far from free. Hadoop’s sheer complexity makes… [read more]
Well, this is interesting — if entirely unsurprising. Gartner’s Dennis Gaughan recently gave a talk in Australia and exposed a few secrets about the true intentions of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP — you know, the stuff they don’t tell customers. Business Insider sums it up (emphasis mine): Microsoft mainly wants to protect Windows and… [read more]
It is well known that Oracle’s Larry Ellison insists on stating they have all the features of the competition. Instead of making a best-of-breed product, they bolt ever-increasing layers of crud onto their product line. The result is that Oracle’s product line is morbidly obese. Big Data’s Mr. Creosote. For those that remember the Meaning… [read more]
From grocery stores to electronic retail stores, loyalty programs are in the process of getting a facelift with the realisation that they are more effective… without the cards. How many times do customers go to the shop, pick up what they wanted, arrive at the point of sale, and realise that their loyalty card is… [read more]
The future of loyalty marketing combines Big Data being delivered to Big User populations with Mobile access. How do these elements come together into a single, extremely focused solution? Not with traditional loyalty programs or card schemes. It’s not about blindly blasting offers to customers in the hopes of a few more sales. It has… [read more]
I recently wondered aloud about Hadoop and its place in the modern enterprise. I received a lot of feedback on that post, and it brought a few other questions to mind. Hadoop is an Apache project based on some papers Google released on their Map Reduce and Google File System (GFS) technologies. Google is an… [read more]
Big Data has exploded, and it can either bury you and your business, or provide greater amounts of insight into customers and potential customers than ever before. In 2007 the total of Global Data was estimated to be 297 exabytes, equivalent to 1.2 billion average hard drives, or the entire area of the USA covered… [read more]
I am an advocate of making hardware and software implementations as simple as possible for everyone involved. When it comes to “version 1″ of Data Warehouse Appliances, however, I become Pooh Bear. Pooh, you see, has a small brain and when a new thought enters it, he has to push the old one out of… [read more]
A wise mentor of mine used to comment on start-ups by saying “it is our job as executives to work out if there’s a pony in the room or just a room full of pony poop.” He would describe how, upon opening the door to a room full of poop, some people would slam the… [read more]
There’s a recent trend among North American mobile carriers to re-brand their 3G cellular networks as “4G”. Originally meant to classify networks approaching 100 Mbps, Sprint began using “4G” for their WiMax network and now – comically – AT&T for their barely 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ phones. Why? It’s easier to print “4G” on the box… [read more]
