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Big Data Ethics: Vendors Should Take A Stand

I have been working in analytics for over twenty years, and have witnessed first hand how these technologies have made the world a better place. I’ve seen thousands of examples, from every type of corporate efficiency imaginable, to improving...

Posted June 13, 2013    

SAPPHIRE NOW: The Human Face of Big Data

SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando was packed with examples of how Big Data affects all our lives.SAP Executive Steve Lucas was the host of an Intel-sponsored Big Data special interest group meeting at the conference. He kicked off the session by explaining...

Posted May 20, 2013    

Why You Need an In-Memory Action Plan

This is a third post of a series based on a SAP-sponsored breakfast meeting organized in Sydney earlier this year with speaker Donald Feinberg, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst explaining the “Nexus of Forces”: social, mobile, cloud and...

Posted April 22, 2013    

Real-Time Operations: Is the Future Now?

Being able to do operations and analysis in real-time with platforms like SAP Business Suite on HANA is a big deal.But it’s far from being the first time business people have clamored for real-time systems, nor the first time the computer industry...

Posted March 2, 2013    

Analytics in Malaysia: News and Interviews from the SAP Analytics Tour

The second leg of the SAP Analytics Innovation Tour of Asia and ANZ took place yesterday in Kuala Lumpur. Again, more people came than were expected – to the extent that we had to take down one of the dividing walls of the room in order to...

Posted February 22, 2013    

Analytics Moves To The Core: Reporting from the Gartner Summit

I attended the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit last week in Barcelona. As usual, it was a great conference, and it was great to catch up with analysts, colleagues, customers, and competitors. The first morning included a Gartner...

Posted February 15, 2013    

Scary Big Data, Cool 3D Analytics and More

What’s going on in the analytics world this week?Big, Scary Big DataThe New York Times did some “etymological detective work” to resolve the tricky question of who first coined the term “big data” in its current meaning (and some man-in-the street...

Posted February 4, 2013    

New Trends in BI, Analytics and Social Media

What’s Missing From Your BI?This week? Two things:First, a real understanding of how people create and use information, according to a Harvard Business Review article entitled Why IT fumbles AnalyticsSecond, Forrester analyst Boris Evelson says you...

Posted January 27, 2013    

Brain Scans Show No Difference Between Pie Chart and Bar Chart Perception?

Which is better for communicating information: pie charts or bar charts? “Pie charts communicate information poorly… Our visual perception is not designed to accurately assign quantitative values to 2-D areas” says visualization expert Stephen Few...

Posted January 25, 2013    

OLTP meets OLAP, BI Conferences, Sybase Who? And Other News

The Big NewsThe big news over the last week has been, of course, the release of SAP Business Suite Powered by HANA. The first major change to SAP’s applications since R3, it was called “ein game-changer” by press around the world.Ray Wang did a nice...

Posted January 19, 2013    

Baking and Computers, a Surprising History of Analytics Pioneers

Perhaps surprisingly, bakers have a history of being analytics pioneers, from the first business application ever to the latest in-memory technology.In 1951, the J. Lyons company, famous for their tea-shops throughout the UK, built and used the LEO...

Posted December 20, 2012    

Christmas Tree Analytics

According to research firm IBISWorld, Americans will spend around $3.4 billion buying over 25M Christmas trees this year, and you can see how those numbers break down in this Business Insider article.Last year, one large international retailer used...

Posted December 11, 2012