GigaOM » data-analytics

How data warehousing is now a cost-effective solution for businesses

nraden — Mon, 13 May 2013 06:55:34 +0000

The new economics of data warehousing provide attractive alternatives in both costs and benefits. While big data gets most of the attention, evolved data warehousing will play an important role for the foreseeable future. In order to be relevant, data-warehouse design and operation need to be simplified, taking advantage of greatly improved hardware, software, and methods.

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How to manage big data without breaking the bank

George Gilbert — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:55:18 +0000

In the tsunami of experimentation, investment, and deployment of systems that analyze big data, vendors have seemingly been trying approaches at two extremes—either embracing the Hadoop ecosystem or building increasingly sophisticated query capabilities into database management system (DBMS) engines.For some use cases, there appears to be room for a third approach that lies between the extremes and borrows from the best of each.

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Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:55:38 +0000

“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes.

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How to use big data to make better business decisions

Paul Miller — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:55:06 +0000

Companies are rushing to embrace the promise of big data to understand both their businesses and the ways in which customers interact with them. But effective data-based decisions are not made in response to simplistic data reporting; they are made in response to considered and ongoing data analysis.

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Think Big Analytics wants to help companies make the most of Hadoop

Jordan Novet — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:00:22 +0000

A big-data-analytics consulting company launches Tuesday with $3 million in seed funding, under the name Think Big Analytics. Established in 2010, Think Big seeks to help companies start making the most of their data in the most cost-effective ways.

Former Cisco executive Dan Scheinman led the round of funding for Think Big, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. WI Harper Group joined in the round, too. The company will primarily use the seed funding to add people to its data science and data engineering teams.

When Think Big first started, many customers didn’t know what big data was, said Ron Bodkin, Think Big’s CEO and a co-founder. Use cases have evolved since then, he said, and demand for big data analytics has grown.

Think Big has already worked with NetApp and Quantcast, as well as a U.S. telecommunications company. Use cases vary from early-stage adoption to quests for better efficiency. Think Big has helped a large retailer institute a big data architecture to give tailored recommendations to customers based on their input during in-store visits, phone calls and mobile interactions. Think Big guided a different retailer as it transferred from a legacy Teradata Corp. appliance to a Hadoop cluster, thereby dropping query times from six hours to four minutes.

Think Big employees have a few ways to respond to the demand. They could assist a client in prioritizing use cases before working with a Hadoop vendor such as Cloudera or Hortonworks, Bodkin said. A client could also send as many as 20 developers to a three-day hands-on Think Big course covering Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Pig and other topics. Courses for non-developers and executives are also available.

Other companies don’t block Think Big’s development as much as reliance on tried and true methods for analyzing data, said Bodkin, who will speak at our Structure:Data conference in March.

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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:55:48 +0000

The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have put question marks around the use of cloud computing. Many enterprises found more IT dollars in their budgets, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. And while the enterprise focused largely on private clouds, interest in public cloud computing is greater than many analysts expected. This fourth-quarter analysis discusses these trends and more.

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How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

cwaxer — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 07:55:46 +0000

Once known for its online job boards and newspaper classified ads, talent management is now a $4 billion industry. Helping to redefine this age-old HR practice is workforce analytics, a powerful combination of highly sophisticated computer algorithms and predictive models. However, HR professionals face an enormous hurdle: how to make a business case for a high-priced technology that can often lead to IT headaches, hardware expenditures, and overturned HR processes. Linking these workforce analytics to business success can help HR professionals convince corporate bean counters to bankroll the crunching of human-capital data.

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Big data 2013: key trends and companies to watch

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:55:31 +0000

Besides the skyrocketing growth of data itself, there are several key technology trends we will be watching in 2013. That list includes a renaissance in the database market, next-generation SaaS-based BI and visualization tools, and data warehousing as a service. This report examines these trends and others, as well as the companies making a difference in big data that are worth watching as the industry moves into the next year.

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Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:55:38 +0000

In 2013 look for the action in social technologies to be increasingly enterprise-focused. In 2012 investors soured on consumer social media companies: Groupon, Zynga, and even Facebook were deemed disappointing. Arguably, Facebook left no money on the table. As it began to show revenue from mobile by the year’s end, its stock began to recover, but the damage was done. So a different set of companies will drive innovation and perhaps a little disruption in social technologies in 2013. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year.

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Swipely hits its stride combining payments, analytics and loyalty

Ryan Kim — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:01:37 +0000

Swipely began life as a way for consumers to share their credit card purchases, similar to Blippy and Facebook’s controversial Beacon feature. Then, Swipely switched it up and worked to help deliver deals and loyalty points to consumers. Now, the Providence, RI company started by former TellMe founder Angus Davis is finding its groove as a merchant-facing service that processes card payments and delivers data analytics and marketing tools.

The company for the last six months has competed against big payment processors and merchants acquirers like Bank of America, First Data and Chase Paymentech. But instead of trying to compete on lower fees, it supplies data analytics, marketing and loyalty services that are built off credit card swipe transactions. This gives merchants valuable tools to break down sales trends, better identify their best customers and reach out to loyal or lapsed customers through email marketing and retention tools.

In the six months since Swipely moved to this model of combining payments, analytics and marketing, it has processed $250 million in payment volume. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to big competitors. But the solid growth shows that Swipely may be on to a business model that works. And now the company is expanding its offering for its merchants to help them get even more insights and forge a better relationship with their customers.

With Swipely Winter ’13 update, Swipely is now able to provide spending data on individual users, so a merchant can see what its top users are doing in real-time and cater to their needs. Previously, Swipely offered trend and aggregate spending data, but now it can provide a CRM tool complete with customer profiles for merchants.

Swipely is also offering next-day settlement through a partnership with American Express. Merchants can use Swipely’s newly tablet-optimized dashboard to receive more detailed sales data, such as hourly sales trends, multiple location information and daily sales reports that include social media interactions. And Swipely is opening up its service to 20 more point of sale systems.

Davis said Swipely is now where it needs to be, competing in the massive $70 billion payments market. He said the landscape for pure loyalty startups is bleak, something Google also seemed to acknowledge with the recent closure of Punchd. By bundling in payments, Swipely can displace an existing cost for merchants and replace it with free marketing and analytics tools for businesses. He said most businesses are not getting any real data insights from their payment processor.

“We give merchants the ability to understand their sales data. You can now understand your customers in ways you couldn’t before,” said Swipely. “We’re bringing analytics to Main Street.”

What makes Swipely attractive is that the company matches whatever fees that a previous payment processor offered so there’s no added cost to try it out. And it works with most existing hardware so it doesn’t require any new point of sale upgrades.

Davis said the company only has a few hundred customers, who are doing an average of $1 million in annual card transactions. But he expects his customer base to skyrocket in 2013 as merchants learn about the service and he’s quadrupling his sales team to handle the demand.

I think Swipely made a smart move in finding the right fit for its card swiping technology. Many merchants are still struggling to better understand their customers and could use the tools Swipely offers. Some mobile payment services like Square offer simple analytics, but they don’t always appeal to bigger merchants who have sunk a lot of money into existing hardware.

Swipely, which has raised $8.5 million to date, also works with some mobile point-of-sale applications like Lavu POS. The product shows that the credit card is still valuable to merchants and consumers even with the rise of mobile payments. Despite a bunch of iterations, Swipely may have finally found an approach that sticks.

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