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Customer data / shutterstock

Focusing on customer retention and reducing churn instead of customer acquisition, Gainsight integrates with Salesforce and uses sales data, surveys, support tickets, usage logs and other sources of customer intelligence to turn customer retention into an automated, data-driven process.[read more]

What's your data story? 

My colleagues and I had the opportunity to represent Attivio at the recent Tableau 8 Roadshow as a partner vendor. Unlike some BI events I have experienced over a number of years, the Tableau 8 Roadshow attendees were very much user-based rather than IT-focused.[read more]

Big Data journey / shutterstock

While much around big data remains hype, many companies are in the fledging stages of drawing value from their big data corpus, and given an army of discussions and opinions around the topic, it’s still hard to find a clear roadmap to arrive at the Big Promise.[read more]

BI evolution

Operational analytics is making headlines in 2013. But why is it important? And why is it more likely to succeed now than in the mid-2000s, when it was called operational BI, or the mid-1990s when it surfaced as the operational data store (ODS)? Let's see what has changed.[read more]

data flow

Crowdsourcing is an Internet-age phenomenon by which problems are distributed to “the crowd,” and those in the online community offer partial solutions. These partial solutions, when taken in aggregate, solve the overall problem. Today, crowdsourcing is contributing to scientific advances in health care.[read more]

What's in a name? / Shutterstock

Earlier this week, the Business section of the Flemish quality newspaper 'De Standaard' reported that the shorter the first name, the higher the income. The article showed a pricture of Bill Gates, with the caption: "Was using the nickname 'Bill' the key to the success of William Henry Gates?" There are, however, a few concerns with this research.[read more]

decision management / shutterstock

I have written about few in-memory technologies and approaches in recent months, and into this space has come Teradata with its new Intelligent Memory. I would summarize the idea behind the Teradata Intelligent Memory product with three points.[read more]

social collaboration in finance / shutterstock

Finance departments don’t immediately come to mind in conversations about social collaboration technology. Yet business and social collaboration is an important set of capabilities that has been taking hold in business.[read more]

Internat'l Big Data Week / shutterstock

Big Data Week in Atlanta gathered hundreds of professionals from across several industry sectors around the common idea that Big Data is fueling answers to difficult questions. Big Data is fueling cross-sector innovation that is here to stay; it will drive Atlanta to be a leader across industries. Here’s how and why.[read more]

big data privacy / shutterstock

One of the most discussed concerns surrounding big data today is privacy. While many powerful analytics are possible with the detailed data that is now collected on each of us, the sensitive nature of much of that data requires rethinking data practices and applications.[read more]

Data science: sexier than ever?

A recent Harvard Business Review article argues that being a data scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century. Data scientists help companies turn their data (big data and small data) into valuable insights. But do the people who have the sexiest job of the 21st century have to be sexy?[read more]

Big Data jobs

It has been highly chronicled that the Big Data talent shortage is turning into a storm of epic proportions; the number of Big Data Analytics positions is expected to reach 4 million globally by 2015. So will H1-B visa holders be the solution to the Big Data talent shortage? Yes, if a few things happen.[read more]

Future of Big Data / shutterstock

Big Data and ROI. Many of you will be asked to justify the investment you’re making in Big Data Analytics technology. ROI is key term you’ll hear. But companies that are trying to look at Data Analytics as a tactical budget item are in trouble. Here's why.[read more]

A Big Data solution

Cloud, social, mobile: all of these technologies are connected through one important commonality, and that is Big Data. By allowing individuals to quickly discover important information through the use of data, organizations are given the power to make smarter data-driven business decisions.[read more]

SaaS / shutterstock

Data stored in SaaS applications is often inaccessible to BI tools. This is a major headache to early adopters of SaaS applications. With on-premise applications, IT departments can bypass the application and access data directly from the underlying database.[read more]