Archive for the ‘Business Intelligence’ Category

More “Business Intelligence” and less “Business Negligence” for businesses

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Data Mining when implied smartly and correctly in your day to day business,is named Business Intelligence. According to Mr. Kevin Falconer, GM of local storage and networking distributor, Channel Data,” Most dealers and resellers are awash with valuable data that could make a significant difference to their bottom line, if used correctly.”

Data mining means extracting patterns from existing data. If this extraction process is applied to corporate industry many fruitful results can be seen. If, in a business administration or organisation, one keeps a note of the Sales, Market research, Customer’s requirements and complaints encountered and then mine this data to predict or identify patterns to understand the correct requirements of the customer and further fulfilling them. This will help boost the business and improve customer relationships.

This combination of data ming and business management is becoming cheaper as the computers and large storage disks used in this process are easily available now and at affordable prices. But, this process may also lead to the shifting of focus of providing service from the most profitable (minority) less percentage of customers to less profitable (majority) highly demanding customers. It is therefore vitally important to recognise profitable customers, and the characteristics that define them, Falconer argues. For example, changes in their purchasing behaviour can either present an opportunity to follow the trend, or a threat the company will promptly have to address. Accurate, up-to-date customer information will give sales staff many cross-sell, up-sell, and repeat-sales opportunities, he concludes. Unfortunately, this data is rarely analysed or put to productive use because many small business owners often neglect to apply core marketing principles to attract and retain clients.
As more and more data is mined and converted into knowledge historical patterns will crystalline and trend lines will become evident. Data mining, integrated into modern customer relationship management solutions are already enabling IT reseller businesses to grow the ‘lifetime value’ of their customers and so assume leadership positions in the IT industry – whether their target market is individual end users or corporate clients. Now which strategy will you choose? The good old Business Negligence or the fast developing Business Intelligence. When you have success at your door step.. Why not opening up the door instead of ignoring it?

[IT WEB]

  • Share/Bookmark

Pervasive BI Tool from Information Builders : WebFOCUS RStat 1.2

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Information Builders, which  leads the pervasive business intelligence (BI) systems, announced the release of WebFOCUS RStat 1.2, an integrated modern BI platform that to create predictive applications.

Benefits:

It appeals to a broad group of business analysts and an operational employee because of it significantly reduces the “IT complexity” for non-statistically trained users. It has become a general-purpose data mining and statistical tool. RStat provides greater business benefits by enabling more employees at all levels in an organization to take advantage of a predictive solution and make better decisions. RStat 1.2 dramatically lowers the cost of predictive analytics. By fully integrating RStat with WebFOCUS, customers benefit from significantly lower costs of mining projects simply by providing efficient access to data. Ninety percent of costs in statistical and mining projects are in data access and manipulation — two activities that are easier with BI tools. Additionally, the integration on the reporting server lowers deployment costs by minimizing the need for additional hardware. Instead of having a statistical server and a BI server, RStat 1.2 enables customers to conduct both BI and predictive modeling from a single server. Having this type of integrated environment makes the deployment of a predictive scoring solution much simpler and faster than older statistical systems. Information Builders is providing RStat free for modeling and analysis services as part of its Developer Studio product.

What’s NEW:

The new features provided in this tool are:-

– Survival analysis – included as an additional statistical modeling technique and scoring routine with both COX regression and Kaplan-Mayer.

– Library of scoring routines – expanded to advanced models such as Neural Networks.

– Charting capabilities – expanded with new charts that are relevant for survival analysis.

– Testing – Traditional hypothesis testing methods, such as T and F tests, have also been added.

Website:

www.informationbuilders.com

DOWNLOAD:

http://techsupport.informationbuilders.com/

If you are an existing Information Builders customer and you have a standard Developer Studio (version 7.6.9 or higher) license, click here to download your free copy of WebFOCUS RStat now! Just log in and select Download > My Downloads/Shipments. Registration is required.

About ‘INFORMATION BUILDERS:

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs. Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at informationbuilders.com.

Also Lets listen to Chris Brady of DSC on WebFOCUS:

[webFOCUS]

Blog Gallery by Picturesurf

  • Share/Bookmark

The datamining journey so far ..

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

This new year, let us go through all the major developments that have taken place in the Data Mining industry over the years. Here is a quick glimpse:

datamining journey so far

A description:

1993
  • Development of WEKA begins:
    • In 1993, the University of Waikato in New Zealand started development of the original version of Weka.  Weka (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) is a popular suite of machine learning software written in Java, developed at the University of Waikato. WEKA is free software available under the GNU General Public License.
1996
  • CRISP-DM is conceived
    • CRISP-DM stands for CRoss Industry Standard Process for Data Mining. It is a data mining process model that describes commonly used approaches that expert data miners use to tackle problems. Polls conducted later in 2002, 2004, and 2007 show that it is the leading methodology used by data miners
1998
  • KXEN  established
    • Founded in 1998, KXEN has corporate offices in San Francisco, California and Paris, France, with Fortune 1000 customers around the world.
1999
  • CRISP-DM 1.0 released
    • After it was conceived in 1996, in 1997 CRISP-DM got underway as a European Union project under the ESPRIT funding initiative. The project was led by four companies: ISL, NCR Corporation,Daimler-Benz and OHRA. The first version of the methodology was released as CRISP-DM 1.0 in 1999.
2000
  • The ‘R’ Project considered stable for production
    • R is an implementation of the S programming language with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R Development Core Team.
2003
  • Appricon established
    • In order to provide a better data mining solution, Analysis Studio® and the Analysis Studio® end-to-end logistic regression modeling solution were weaved into enterprise data mining projects in 2003.
    • SAS 9.1 was released in 2003
2004
  • Rapidminer distributed with GNU license
    • The initial version has been developed by the Artificial Intelligence Unit of University of Dortmund since 2001. It is distributed under a GNU license, and has been hosted by SourceForgesince 2004.
    • SAS 9.1.2 was released in 2004.
2005
  • Amazon launches Mechanical Turk
    • The service was launched publicly on November 2, 2005. In early- to mid-November 2005, there were tens of thousands of HITs, all of them uploaded to the system by Amazon itself for some of its internal tasks that required human intelligence. Most of these were related to music CD items.
    • The number of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk HITs in the system soon decreased after its launch in november, and by December 20, there were less than 100 groups of HITs on the average page load
    • Weka receives the SIGKDD Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Service Award
    • SAS 9.1.3 was released in 2005.
2006
  • Work on CRISP-DM 2.0 begins
    • In July 2006 the consortium of CRISP-DM announced that it was going to start the process of working towards a second version of CRISP-DM. On 26 September 2006, the CRISP-DM SIG met to discuss potential enhancements for CRISP-DM 2.0 and the subsequent roadmap.
    • Pentaho acquires exclusive …..
      • In 2006, Pentaho Corporation acquired an exclusive license to use Weka for business intelligence. It forms the data mining and predictive analytics component of the Pentaho business intelligence suite.
2008
  • COGNOS acquired by IBM
    • Cognos (Cognos Incorporated) was an Ottawa, Ontario based company making business intelligence (BI) and performance management software. On January 31, 2008, Cognos was officially acquired by IBM. The Cognos name continues to be used, being applied to IBM’s line of business intelligence (BI) and performance management products.
    • SAS 9.2 is the latest release (March 2008) and was demonstrated at SAS Global Forum (previously called SUGI) 2008.
2009
  • PASW/ SPSS
    • PASW (formerly SPSS) is a computer program used for statistical analysis. Before 2009 it was called SPSS, but in 2009 it was re-branded as PASW (Predictive Analytics Software). The company announced July 28, 2009 that it was being acquired by IBM for US$1.2 billion.

Microsoft:

1996
  • Microsoft opens new team to build an OLAP product, codenamed Plato (permutation of letters from OLAP)
  • Panorama Software delegation meets with Microsoft
  • Microsoft announces acquisition of Panorama Software development team
1997
  • OLAP Services 7.0 (codename Sphinx) ships
2000
  • Analysis Services 2000 (codename Shiloh) ships
    • Microsoft Analysis Services is part of Microsoft SQL Server, a database management system. Microsofthas included a number of services in SQL Server related to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. These services include Integration Services and Analysis Services. Analysis Services includes a group ofOLAP and Data Mining capabilities.
    • Microsoft Corp. announces the beta release of the OLE DB for Data Mining specification, a protocol based on the SQL language, that provides software vendors and application developers with an open interface to more efficiently integrate data mining tools and capabilities into line-of-business and e-commerce applications.
2001
  • XML for Analysis SDK 1.0 ships
2004
  • ADOMD.NET and XML for Analysis SDK 1.1 ship
2005
  • Analysis Services 2005 (codename Yukon) ships
2008
  • Analysis Services 2008 (codename Katmai) ships
2009
  • Microsoft has decided to make the BI Conference into a biennial event, with the next conference in 2010. For 2009, we are excited to team with the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) to expand the BI tracks at PASS Summit 2009 and help deliver the content that BI architects, developers, and administrators need to get the most value from their Microsoft SQL Server and BI-based solutions.
  • PowerPivot gives users the power to create compelling self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organizations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools.

Amazon:

2003
  • “Search Inside the Book” is a feature which allows customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog. The feature started with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches.
2005
  • In November 2005, Amazon.com began testing Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing programs to dispatch tasks to human processors.
2006
  • Amazon launched an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). An unlimited number of data objects, from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes in size, can be stored in S3 and distributed via HTTP or BitTorrent .In April 2006, Amazon introduced Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), a distributed queue messaging service.
2007
  • In January 2007 Amazon launched Amapedia, a collaborative wiki for user-generated content to replace ProductWiki
  • In December 2007, Amazon introduced SimpleDB, a database system, allowing users of its other infrastructure to utilize a high reliability high performance database system.
2008
  • Amazon Web Services launched a public beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

Yahoo!:

2002
  • Yahoo! HotJobs, previously known as hotjobs.com, is an online job search engine. It has been known as Yahoo! HotJobs since being acquired by Yahoo! in 2002. Yahoo! HotJobs provides tools and advice for job seekers, employers, and staffing firms.
2003
  • Yahoo! Introduces Smartsort Technology: Personalized Product Recommendation Tool
    • The new Yahoo! Product Search powers the redesigned Yahoo! Shopping, providing consumers with the most comprehensive and relevant comparison-shopping site on the Web. The redesigned Yahoo! Shopping now boasts a variety of comparison-shopping features including: side-by-side product comparison, detailed buyer’s guides, tax and shipping calculator tool, consumer product and merchant ratings, unbiased expert product reviews etc. Yahoo! Shopping is the third largest multi-category commerce destination on the Web. (Nielsen//NetRatings, August 2003)
2004
  • Yahoo! Launches SmartView Technology: New Mapping Feature Creates Customized Visual Search Capability
2005
  • Yahoo! Search Launches Search Subscriptions Beta, Providing Select Deep Web Content to Users
2006
  • Yahoo! Opens Internet Time Capsule to Capture Life in 2006
    • SUNNYVALE, Calif., October 10, 2006 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) today announced the launch of what is expected to be the world’s largest time capsule in history. Starting today, Yahoo! is encouraging people from around the world to contribute personal photos, stories, thoughts, ideas, poems, home movies and art to this first-ever electronic…
2007
  • Yahoo! pipes: Yahoo! Pipes was released to the public in beta on 7 February 2007.Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The application works by enabling users to “pipe” information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (for example, filtering).
2008
  • The software, called Hadoop, is part of Yahoo’s massive computing grid and is transforming the way Yahoo and corporate giants such as IBM extract meaning from enormous streams of data. Universities are also using the code – an open-source version of software Google relies on for daily operation – to train a new generation of computer scientists and engineers. On February 19, 2008, Yahoo! launched what it claimed was the world’s largest Hadoop production application. The Yahoo! Search Webmap is a Hadoop application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.
  • Yahoo joins OPEN SOCIAL: On Mar 25, 2008 Yahoo! also announced it has joined the initiative . OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. It was released November 1, 2007. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, MySpace, orkut, Netlo], Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo!.
  • Yahoo! Inc. announces the general availability of Fire Eagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net), an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data
  • Yahoo! Opens Up Search Technology Infrastructure for Innovative, New Search Experiences, Providing Third Parties with Unprecedented Access, Re-Ranking and Presentation Control of Web Search Results:
    • BOSS: Build your own search service:   The main goal and idea of BOSS is to give users, in this case developers, free access to the Yahoo! Search index. The results can be supplied into the developer’s website or program so that they can manipulate the resources according to their product’s requirements. BOSS allows the results to be returned back in XMLJSONHTMLtext and also allows the comprehensive search feature allowed in Yahoo like pulling the results by pages, searching inside PDF, etc. The ranking of the websites for a search term is same as the Yahoo! Searchranking since both of these are pulling from the same index and ranking.

2009
  • On June 10, 2009, Yahoo! released its own distribution of Hadoop.

Google:

1998
2000
2001
  • Image Search launches, offering access to 250 million images.
  • Google is available in 26 languages
  • Search index reaches 3 billion mark.
2002
  • The first Google hardware is released: it’s a yellow box called the Google Search Appliance that businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their own documents.
  • Google releases a major overhaul for AdWords, including new cost-per-click pricing.
  • Google releases a set of APIs, enabling developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and program in their favorite environment, including Java, Perl and Visual Studio.
  • Users can search for stuff to buy with Froogle (later called Google Product Search).
  • Partnership with AOL
  • Google Labs is launched
2003
  • Google announces a new content-targeted advertising service, enabling publishers large and small to access Google’s vast network of advertisers. (Weeks later, on April 23, we acquired Applied Semantics, whose technology bolsters the service named AdSense.)
  • Google acquires blogger.com
2004
  • Search index reaches 8 billion
  • Orkut released
  • Keyhole Acquired
2005
  • Urchin acquired
  • Google Maps, code.google.com launched
  • Google image search boasts of 1.1 billion images.
  • iGoogle launched
  • Google Earth, Google talk launched
2006
  • YouTube acquired
  • Jotspot acquired
  • Google docs and spreadsheets launched
  • Google custom search launched
2007
  • Google hot trends launched
  • Partnership with salesforce.com
  • Postini acquired
  • Joint supercomputing project with IBM
2008
  • DoubleClick acquired
  • Google index: 1 trillion
  • Google Chrome browser launched
  • Google tracks flu trends

IBM:

1995
  • IBM acquires Lotus
1996
  • IBM launches its DB2 relational database.
  • IBM acquires Tivoli.
1998
  • IBM launches the PowerPC 740/750 processors, the world’s first manufactured using IBM’s copper manufacturing technology.
  • Two new AS/400s are introduced, as well as new products in the Aptiva, PC, and Thinkpad series.The IBM S/390 computing system for business is also launched.
1999
  • The S/390 G6 server, using IBM’s cop per technology, is introduced.
  • IBM and Dell sign a $16 billion technoogy agreement, where Dell will purchase IBM components for use in Dell systems.
  • IBM and Lotus found the Institute for Knowledge Management.
2000
  • IBM launches the NetVista line of PC devices.
  • IBM launches the eServer line.
2002
  • Product offerings during 2002 include the eServer p650 eight-way UNIX server, the eServer i890, and the IBM eServer xSeries 440.
  • IBM acquires Price Waterhouse Coopers’ business consulting and technology services unit for $3.5 billion in cash and stock.
2003
  • IBM and Cisco announce a set of open software technologies designed to advance the development of “self-healing” computer systems and networks.
  • IBM and Siebel launch CRM OnDemand.
  • IBM launches its WebSphere business integration software.
  • Japan’s largest research organization orders an AMD Opteron based eServer 325 supercomputer, running Linux.
2005
  • IBM plans to expand its data-integration product line through a $1.1 billion acquisition of Ascential Software Corp.
2007
  • Google and I.B.M. Join hands  in ‘Cloud Computing’ Research
2008
  • Researchers with IBM have developed a new set of software applications designed to improve the human memory. The software is designed to run on a smartphone or mobile handset and analyze collected pieces of data. The collected data is then used to help the user better remember faces and other information such as conversations.
2009
  • IBM boasts that its so-called Sequoia system will be capable of crunching numbers 20 times faster than IBM’s last record-breaker and 15 times faster than the current fastest machine.

Sources:

–  SAGAR JAUHARI, SDE Intern.

  • Share/Bookmark

Where are we with Cloud Analytics?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

b-eye-network.com has come up with a neat article on “What’s Up with Cloud Analytics?” and we have compiled a shorter blurp on the same.

Cloud computing is the popular and widely used term for virtualization of computing services. Cloud technology is all about services, and it fits into several categories:

  • Software as a Service (SaaS) is an Internet-based model for deployment of software applications. SaaS allows on-demand use of applications without the need to license and install for every computer where the software is used. SaaS is differentiated from earlier client-server and application service provider (ASP) models by multi-tenant architecture where many customers simultaneously use a single instance of the software.
  • Data as a Service (DaaS) is a relatively recent term that encompasses four somewhat different kinds of service models.
    • Most common among DaaS models is the “data marketplace” where many different kinds of data are available on a pay-per-use basis. Marketplace data can be combined with internal data to enrich data warehouses and add new dimensions to analytics.
    • Some providers of data marketplace services extend the model to include some data quality, standardization and correlation services. Most of these services revolve around address data and go beyond common address standardization routines to include features such as delivery route optimization.
    • A more recent and emerging DaaS model uses web services to create a developer-centric data hub. In this model, developers upload their own data to be hosted by the DaaS service provider. Developers can then build web services around that data.
    • Finally, the acronym DaaS is also used to mean data warehousing as a service, an architecture in which data and BI applications are hosted in a virtualized environment and deployed using a services model.

  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an approach to virtualizing the hardware, operating systems, applications frameworks and technology stacks upon which applications are built and deployed. PaaS removes the cost and complexity of buying and managing the hardware and software layers needed to deploy applications. A PaaS environment supports the entire life cycle of building, delivering, operating and supporting web applications.

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is an architecture of virtualized hardware and operating systems. On the surface it sounds a lot like another name for PaaS, but there are some subtle differences. PaaS provides developer environment as well as operations environment but is limited to web applications. IaaS delivers only the operations environment but supports a broader range of applications. IaaS is, in fact, the foundation upon which PaaS environments are constructed.

  • Analytics as a Service has not been tagged with the acronym AaaS, perhaps due to the inevitable vocalization that is sure to fail as a marketing buzzword. But analytics as a service is a concept that is gaining attention in the BI community. Analytic services are built upon SaaS and DaaS foundations to create analytic applications and OLAP engines as web-hosted and web-deployed applications.

Today the Cloud Services are very real and available. The BI solutions on the cloud are also being made available to people, business and enterprises. But when would the transfer complete to the cloud,  is still an ongoing discussion.

Read more here.

  • Share/Bookmark