The explosion of data in recent years has resulted in huge demand for not only storage and processing solutions, but also techniques and tools to make sense of this data. The emergence of visualization tools – interactive dashboards, bar graphs, animations – to effectively analyse the information coming from inside and outside of organisations, has meant that business intelligence (BI) is becoming jointly governed by IT and business users themselves. Companies like Tableau, Birst, Jaspersoft and SiSense (to name just a few) are targeting enterprise customers with the promise of data accessibility across the whole organisation – from novice C-level executives to seasoned IT professionals. Among these companies, Qlik announced yesterday it is preparing to offer a free version of its Qlik Sense Desktop with no restrictions on either personal or…
The European Central Bank admitted today that hackers have broken into its database and stolen personal information. The ECB said that email addresses and contact data has been taken from its database for conferences, leaving street addresses, telephone numbers and 20,000 email addresses held by the bank compromised by theft. Other information stolen, according to ZDNet, in encrypted form, was “data on downloads from the ECB website.” The ECB learnt of the theft after an anonymous email was sent to the organisation asking for money in exchange for the data. “There had been a breach of the security protecting a database serving its public website. This led to the theft of email addresses and other contact data left by people registering for events at the ECB,” said the central bank.…
Almost six months after the purchase of BlueKai, Oracle has announced two new services to “help business users drive smarter, more informed decisions across the enterprise.” The newly released service, dubbed Oracle Data Cloud, will have two offerings involved: Oracle DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) for Marketing and Oracle DaaS for Social. The former will be subscription based product giving marketers access to anonymous user-level data across a number of sources, whereas the latter will deliver enriched social media data providing intelligence on customers, competitors and market trends. “Unbundling data from SaaS applications has enhanced a business user’s ability to activate insights gleaned from external data sources, leading to more engaging and personalized customer experiences,” said Omar Tawakol, general manager and group vice president, Oracle Data Cloud. “The Oracle Data Cloud brings together…
Mark Lewis is the Senior Director of Marketing at Cloudera. Cloudera offers a unified platform for big data; its enterprise data hub, built on Apache Hadoop. The Enterprise Data Hub allows companies to execute storage, access, management, analysis, security and search all within one framework. We recently caught up with Mark at Big Data & Analytics Day to discuss the Enterprise Data Hub, the evolving discipline of data science and why Hadoop projects fail. Tell us about the relationship between the Enterprise Data Hub and the data warehouse. A lot of people think they need to build a big data system as though it’s one entire entity. But it’s not, it’s a number of entities, and there’s a journey in how you get there. Many ask “If I…
We often discuss the inherent value of data; perhaps the most obviously valuable data is virtual currency. Bitcoin in particular has garnered vast media recognition and speculation in recent years; Jason Kolb named Bitcoin’s distributed proof of ownership model as a world-changing technology. Another area with incredibly high valuable potential is data science. But is there a way to combine the value streams of Bitcoin and big data? Can we use data science to alleviate the risk and harness the potential of virtual currency? Can we, in essence, use big data to predict the future value of Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency, which works peer-to-peer without a centralised repository, and is currently accepted as a form of payment by 30,000 vendors. This video is pretty…
If you thought Chief Data Officers could only be found inside large enterprises, think again. The city of San Francisco has its own CDO, Joy Bonaguro, who is responsible for the city’s newly-announced open data strategic plan. The plan outlines the city’s future plans for open data- including, crucially, the creation of “process for accessing your individual data.” The plan as a whole outlines six goals they hope to achieve over the next 6 years, with the overarching aim to “broaden the focus of open data from simply publishing to making it available in a manner that fosters better use of the data.” Goals include improving data quality and encouraging more data-driven decision making, as well as “a process for accessing data that the city holds about you”, to “increase…
Our three part Business Intelligence series has looked at the key developments in BI from the 1960’s all the way to the late 1990’s. In the first edition, we focused on the way data storage changed from hierarchical database management systems (DBMS), like IBM’s IMS in the 60’s, to network DMBS’s and then to relational database management systems (RDMBS) in the late 70’s. The second part of the series investigated the technological advancements through the 80’s and 90’s, predominantly mapping the evolution from mainframes to personal computers, DBMS’s to RDBM’s, and the emergence of new methods and tools like Data Warehousing, Extract Transform Load (ETL), and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). In this edition, we will take a brief look at how BI transitioned from a tool based, IT-centric activity, to…
The explosion of data in recent years has resulted in huge demand for not only storage and processing solutions, but also techniques and tools to make sense of this data. The emergence of visualization tools – interactive dashboards, bar graphs, animations – to effectively analyse the information coming from inside and outside of organisations, has meant that business intelligence (BI) is becoming jointly governed by IT and business users themselves. Companies like Tableau, Birst, Jaspersoft and SiSense (to name just a few) are targeting enterprise customers with the promise of data accessibility across the whole organisation – from novice C-level executives to seasoned IT professionals. Among these companies, Qlik announced yesterday it is preparing to offer a free version of its Qlik Sense Desktop with no restrictions on either personal or…
The European Central Bank admitted today that hackers have broken into its database and stolen personal information. The ECB said that email addresses and contact data has been taken from its database for conferences, leaving street addresses, telephone numbers and 20,000 email addresses held by the bank compromised by theft. Other information stolen, according to ZDNet, in encrypted form, was “data on downloads from the ECB website.” The ECB learnt of the theft after an anonymous email was sent to the organisation asking for money in exchange for the data. “There had been a breach of the security protecting a database serving its public website. This led to the theft of email addresses and other contact data left by people registering for events at the ECB,” said the central bank.…
Almost six months after the purchase of BlueKai, Oracle has announced two new services to “help business users drive smarter, more informed decisions across the enterprise.” The newly released service, dubbed Oracle Data Cloud, will have two offerings involved: Oracle DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) for Marketing and Oracle DaaS for Social. The former will be subscription based product giving marketers access to anonymous user-level data across a number of sources, whereas the latter will deliver enriched social media data providing intelligence on customers, competitors and market trends. “Unbundling data from SaaS applications has enhanced a business user’s ability to activate insights gleaned from external data sources, leading to more engaging and personalized customer experiences,” said Omar Tawakol, general manager and group vice president, Oracle Data Cloud. “The Oracle Data Cloud brings together…
Mark Lewis is the Senior Director of Marketing at Cloudera. Cloudera offers a unified platform for big data; its enterprise data hub, built on Apache Hadoop. The Enterprise Data Hub allows companies to execute storage, access, management, analysis, security and search all within one framework. We recently caught up with Mark at Big Data & Analytics Day to discuss the Enterprise Data Hub, the evolving discipline of data science and why Hadoop projects fail. Tell us about the relationship between the Enterprise Data Hub and the data warehouse. A lot of people think they need to build a big data system as though it’s one entire entity. But it’s not, it’s a number of entities, and there’s a journey in how you get there. Many ask “If I…
We often discuss the inherent value of data; perhaps the most obviously valuable data is virtual currency. Bitcoin in particular has garnered vast media recognition and speculation in recent years; Jason Kolb named Bitcoin’s distributed proof of ownership model as a world-changing technology. Another area with incredibly high valuable potential is data science. But is there a way to combine the value streams of Bitcoin and big data? Can we use data science to alleviate the risk and harness the potential of virtual currency? Can we, in essence, use big data to predict the future value of Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency, which works peer-to-peer without a centralised repository, and is currently accepted as a form of payment by 30,000 vendors. This video is pretty…
If you thought Chief Data Officers could only be found inside large enterprises, think again. The city of San Francisco has its own CDO, Joy Bonaguro, who is responsible for the city’s newly-announced open data strategic plan. The plan outlines the city’s future plans for open data- including, crucially, the creation of “process for accessing your individual data.” The plan as a whole outlines six goals they hope to achieve over the next 6 years, with the overarching aim to “broaden the focus of open data from simply publishing to making it available in a manner that fosters better use of the data.” Goals include improving data quality and encouraging more data-driven decision making, as well as “a process for accessing data that the city holds about you”, to “increase…
Our three part Business Intelligence series has looked at the key developments in BI from the 1960’s all the way to the late 1990’s. In the first edition, we focused on the way data storage changed from hierarchical database management systems (DBMS), like IBM’s IMS in the 60’s, to network DMBS’s and then to relational database management systems (RDMBS) in the late 70’s. The second part of the series investigated the technological advancements through the 80’s and 90’s, predominantly mapping the evolution from mainframes to personal computers, DBMS’s to RDBM’s, and the emergence of new methods and tools like Data Warehousing, Extract Transform Load (ETL), and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). In this edition, we will take a brief look at how BI transitioned from a tool based, IT-centric activity, to…
