GigaOM » information technology

How big data analytics drives competitive advantage

Editor — Mon, 20 May 2013 06:55:26 +0000

Few companies today have the time or the analytics expertise to apply statistics and complex data modeling to regular or even daily business decisions and operations. Now, however, an ecosystem of companies is emerging to fill this need.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Think your IT consolidation efforts are slow? Check out the feds.

Jordan Novet — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:13:10 +0000

A program the Obama administration established last year to review federal agencies’ portfolios of information-technology assets has identified $2.5 billion in possible savings in the next three years, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel told a congressional committee this week, according to his prepared remarks. (Watch the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform here.)

But, as CIOs dealing with the pains of IT consolidation know, there’s plenty more work for the federal government to do in its quest to make its federal data centers and other IT assets more efficient and cost-effective. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the federal government should do so almost three years ago.

Despite the reported potential for cost savings, recent reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office highlight duplicative investments and issues with the accuracy of the data in OMB’s IT Dashboard.

The GAO report released Tuesday points out that just one of 24 federal agencies submitted a complete inventory of existing data centers, which the federal government wants to consolidate, and not one handed in a complete plan.

More generally, Rep. Darrell Issa of California said during the hearing, “estimates suggest that as much as $20 billion in taxpayer money is wasted each year.”

Rep. John Mica of Florida highlighted findings from a 2012 GAO report showing that in fiscal year 2011 the federal government “funded 622 separate human-resources systems, 580 financial-management systems and 777 supply-chain-management systems.

“So what we’ve ended up with,” Mica said, “is various federal agencies as well as offices within the different agencies making separate and very costly investments in back-office systems that often perform the same function.”

Issa has drafted legislation to set a deadline for the giving Congress a plan to implement the 2010 OMB initiative to consolidate data centers. The bill would require the federal CIO to give Congress specifics on “how agencies will use reductions in floor space, energy use, infrastructure, equipment, applications, personnel (and) increases in multiorganizational use,” as well as “appropriate consideration of shifting Federally owned data centers to commercially owned data centers.”

Clearly, the bill could benefit colocation and maybe even cloud providers. But that might not happen anytime soon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

LinkedIn continues international growth, hits 200 million members

Eliza Kern — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:50:48 +0000

Linkedin continues rolling along and collecting users across the globe, announcing in a blog post Wednesday that it’s hit 200 million users. That’s still a small number in comparison to the social media giant Facebook, but a decent number for a site that targets a fairly different, and more professional, crowd of users.

The majority of LinkedIn users are in the United States (74 million of the 250 million), although the next-highest number of users comes from India, with 18 million users, and Brazil and the United Kingdom, each with 11 million. The company noted that membership is growing fastest in Turkey, and mobile growth is greatest in China and Brazil, speaking to the company’s ability to tap into emerging markets. The biggest sectors that users come from include information technology, financial services, and higher education.

However, 200 million registered members — not regular active users — is still a far cry from Facebook’s 1 billion monthly active users as of October, and even in December, Twitter announced via a tweet that it had more than 200 million monthly active users.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Fewer IPOs in 2012, but venture investors enjoyed bigger payoffs [charts]

Rani Molla — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:55:37 +0000

Both the number of venture-backed initial public offerings (IPOs) and the number of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) decreased in 2012, but their average values increased, according to a report released today by Thompson Reuters.

The Exit Poll report, conducted in conjunction with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), makes clear something we’ve known for a while: IPOs aren’t as popular as they used to be. The average offer amount for IPOs has gone up 225 percent since 2007; the average offer amount for M&As has gone up 16 percent in that same time. Both have seen fewer deals in 2012 than they did five years ago.

According to the report, the information technology sector led with the highest total deal size.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Rethinking IT in the cloud computing era

James Urquhart — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 17:00:27 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about IT and its role in the era of cloud computing, API-driven development and increasing interconnectivity. As enterprise computing moves from a server-centric to an application-centric operations model, what happens to the role of IT in a corporation? What is IT to cloud, anyway?

Nick Carr famously wrote about the lack of differentiation that IT brings to the business in his 2004 book Does IT Matter?. His argument was essentially that as computing is more and more expected in business, the things IT does for the business provide less and less differentiation. That means that each business owning its own information technology makes less and less sense.

If you believe Carr’s vision, cloud computing is one logical outcome. In fact, Carr himself made the argument in his subsequent 2008 book, The Big Switch, where he argued that the increasingly commoditized nature of computing would drive it toward a utility model, like electricity or water. It’s a compelling vision, and one that helped to ignite the cloud computing market we know today.

So, is it possible IT departments will fade away completely as more IT services are available from third parties online and there are fewer legal hurdles to creating, analyzing and taking action on data outside of an organization’s own figurative four walls? I don’t think so.

I think there is a critical role for a central IT unit in organizations of any significant size (beyond help desks and device management). To understand what that role is, however, we have to explore the nature of the applications being created, acquired and operated in those organizations. We also have to explore what IT has been doing, and why that’s so disassociated from what they would be asked to do in a cloud-centric organization.

The IT we know and love

One of the problems of generalizing about IT is that any given organization probably operates somewhat differently from any other. However, there are some general trends that evolved from the client-server computing model that I would argue apply to most mature IT organizations. The most-critical of these trends is what I would call “server centricity,” which might be better called “infrastructure centricity.”

Think about how computing got its start. Before you could do anything, you needed a computer. Once you had a computer, you needed an operating system, which acted as an interface between the human and the machine. With those things in place, you could now decide how you wanted to apply that computer to some form of problem (or some set of problems). That’s where application software came in.

The computer (or the switch or the storage system) was critical to this model. Without the hardware, nothing else happened.

So, IT evolved to take on running infrastructure (and, almost always, operating systems, middleware and databases) to support the applications that business units required to do their jobs. This function grew in complexity until companies spent significant budgets on data centers, infrastructure availability, inter-networking and so on. This was the most critical role IT could possibly play for the business.

IT and cloud computing

Developers — the ones who ultimately applied computing to business problems — were frustrated with the understandably limited capacity that IT had for addressing software opportunities. Standing up infrastructure is work — often expensive work — and the time and money needed to deliver it could never keep up with the so-called long tail of developer demand.

Now, however, the game has changed significantly. General infrastructure is available on a cashflow-friendly basis to anyone who wants it. Add to that the variety of innovative software tools and services that have evolved thanks to the internet, open source and the new economics of cloud computing, and developers are finding utility services a much more palatable option than internal IT for many classes of application development and deployment.

Provisioning virtual servers on Amazon Web Services.

When developers think about operations, they are most definitely focused on the applications themselves, not the infrastructure the applications are running on.

So IT is getting cut out of the loop in many organizations? Not “officially,” and often in very stealthy ways. However, it is happening, and increasingly in unexpected industries and companies. And while most of this happens with the two critical software classes that cloud enables – web applications at scale, and data collection and analysis — some of it is just developer frustration with IT in general.

So what is an IT department to do?

I think the answer comes in recognizing what “application-centricity” really means in a complex business. No business runs on one application. No business has only one deployment that they manage, only one executable that must meet the breadth of its computing demand. Every company runs on a system of applications: a collection of highly interconnected, interdependent software components, services and data that must all work as required in order for the company as a whole to survive and thrive.

In the era of cloud computing, what the business requires of a central IT department is coordination of the application system — aiding the various application owners with what has to happen for their software to be a “good citizen” within the computing environment as a whole.

Here are just a few key questions that IT must answer with respect to the new application system:

1. How does the company handle identity, authentication, authorization, data management, and other central security and compliance-related operations functions that must be coordinated across all of its independent operating entities.

2. How does the company troubleshoot issues that happen when applications interact with each other across operating entity or even development team boundaries?

3. Is there anything that can be done independent of the individual appliations to improve the heath of the system as a whole?

4. Who knows the system as a whole well enough to give the appropriate advice on how to best integrate new application ideas and components?

Thus, the primary role of IT moves from running infrastructure to operating software — or, more accurately, assisting developers in operating their software in a larger software system. It’s a consultative role with a number of tools and services that have to be in place and — this is very important — relevant to the developers that IT is supporting. These could be tools to visualize how applications are interconnected and the resources they’re consuming, or services that add intelligence to operations.

The core idea is that IT has to let go of trying to control everything and focus on coordinating and enhancing things that other people control. It can be done. Several online companies, including Netflix and Amazon do it today. The result is significantly better agility, experimentation and innovation, with the trade-off that cooperation, communication and measurement are increasingly critical to success.

The scary part is that most IT organizations are still infrastructure-centric, or at least “context”-centric if you include so-called enterprise software packages. The move to application-centricity and developer self-service is going to be hard, and require some change of skills and culture. It also means that private cloud is not the most important cloud initiative that IT can take on.

I wonder how long it will be until most IT organizations figure that out.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Arjuna Kodisinghe.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Alliance Health Networks tackles the low-hanging fruit of medicine and data

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 21:22:33 +0000

The combination of information technology and medicine has led to hundreds of startups and another round of excitement for modernizing the way we diagnose patients, track illness and even administer care. There are efforts to build a tricorder, plans to track millions of people’s heartbeats to create a data set for cardiac care and even remote intensive-care units that help keep people safer in the emergency room.

But outside of some whiz-bang technical stuff, there are also hundreds of million of people with access to the internet and a desire to get more information about something as esoteric as PHACE syndrome or as common as depression. Add thousands of medical research papers and descriptions about diseases and treatments available via the National Library of Medicine for free, and you have a business opportunity.

Making meaning from medical research

When Jay Bartot and Derek Streat decided started Medify in 2010 the goal was to use those free research papers to train a machine learning algorithms how to deliver intelligible information to health queries from the masses. Bartot, who had co-founded Farecast, a startup that built a predictive algorithm to tell users the best time to buy airplane tickets, decided to take his knowledge of prediction to the health world ~~after his own family’s brush with a medical problem~~.

In May, Medify was purchased by Alliance Health Networks a Salt Lake City, Utah-based startup that has built out a community of 1.5 million people who gather to discuss diseases and medical conditions. Now, with Medify on board and a community of people whose discussions about health are also a great source of data, Alliance Health is seeing how mining unstructured data from professionals and patients alike can help improve heath.

Medify had used the National Library of Medicine to build out ontologies that it uses to “teach” the algorithms to understand medical terminology and treatment plans, and has then built up a user interface around those algorithms. Like IBM has found with Watson, its supercomputer that has found a role helping doctors diagnose illnesses based on symptoms, medicine is a good place for this type of data mining.

The goal is to take the ontologies learned from Medify and combine its algorithms with what people discuss in Alliance Health’s communities. Then, Alliance can apply new algorithms to see who in the community is offering the best advice, understand how patients influence and inspire each other, and then help pharmaceutical companies and even doctors understand and influence how patients make medical decisions.

Getting value from big data doesn’t have to be a big undertaking.

It’s actually a great example of how thinking about big data doesn’t have to be as complicated as using a supercomputer and expensive clinical research filter through algorithms to help doctors diagnose illnesses. Streat says the company’s data is only in the low-terabyte range and they process it using Amazon Web Services, including EC2 and Elastic MapReduce. They add new data every day and refresh their machine learning algorithms weekly, if not every few days.

There’s a place for these simpler solutions, and by bringing together a community and providing it with information, Alliance Health might become a company much like Spiceworks is in the IT space — able to both monetize and help a community of niche users in a way that benefits everyone. For example, a company that makes a new diabetes test might pay to sponsor the diabetes channel on Alliance or may even pay to find out who the big influencers are in the forums associated with that channel. If done correctly, users might even welcome sponsored how-tos or better information delivered about a new drug or device.

Streat explained that as far as medicine and data-combining go, there are many efforts around devices and even fancier data sets. However, he’s confident that even with something like expensive clinical data that’s locked behind paywalls, just being able to direct people to better answers and give them a sense of community is a good place to start.

Investors seem to think it’s a decent bet as well. Alliance Health has raised $20 million since it’s founding in 2006 from investors such as New World Ventures, Physic Ventures, Epic Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Near-term strategies for IT managers

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 06:55:40 +0000

Three powerful, fast-moving trends are altering the landscape for business information technology (IT) managers and their staff: cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT. The final section of a three-part series, this report presents actionable strategies and tactics that IT managers may use to respond to the new realities of corporate computing. The primary recommendations are to redesign the IT organization for the loss of control, accelerate the IT department’s shift to a service provider model, become more aware of external and internal current realities and emerging trends, and become a proactive leader in developing and implementing IT and corporate strategy.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

New challenges for the IT organization

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:38:23 +0000

Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are combining to create another force that is overwhelming many IT departments: complexity. This report, the second in a three-part series, examines several types of complexity in the business IT environment, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and the related challenges for IT staff.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The new IT manager, part 1

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:55:53 +0000

The days of IT departments dictating which computing assets would be used and how are numbered, in large part because of three trends that are converging on organizations and their IT departments: cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT. This first section of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.