Day: September 22, 2014

Effective Analytics Needs Infrastructure Players to Leverage the Gravity of Data

by , posted in Big Data
Brad Shimmin
Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • The true value of data is not the data itself, the ones and zeros, addresses, and phone numbers. Its real value arises only when you receive timely answers to meaningful questions.
  • The trick is getting close enough to that data to understand more clearly what the data represents — that is, the actual reality described by but hidden away within data.

There is a great book by Douglas Hofstadter titled Godel, Escher, Bach, in which the author describes a fictional machine capable of using Fermat’s Last Theorem and something called the “mathematics of acoustico-retrieval” to recreate an original musical performance by J.S. Bach as played hundreds of years earlier. Do the math right and you can literally hear Bach himself playing on his harpsichord! Obviously, this is complete fiction, but don’t we attempt the same feat when we use analytics tools to pluck business insights out of the boundless data that permeates and surrounds each enterprise? Continue reading “Effective Analytics Needs Infrastructure Players to Leverage the Gravity of Data” →

The OpenPOWER Initiative May Actually Chart a Smarter Path for 64-Bit Computing

by , posted in IT Leader
Steven Hill
Steven Hill

Summary Bullets:

  • The truly open development environment offered by the OpenPOWER Foundation makes the high-performance POWER platform much more accessible and will benefit from the input of participants from all facets of the system design community.
  • The high cost of midrange systems have always restricted them to high-performance, high availability tasks; but IBM’s program opening up the POWER processor platform to the world could usher in the next generation of affordable 64-bit computing options.

Open is an extremely overused word these days. In the world of cloud in which we live, the primary buzzword is always “open” with everyone falling over one and another to prove just how open they are. But there’s open and then there’s OPEN, as evidenced by IBM’s creation and ongoing support of the OpenPOWER Foundation. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve become wary of vendor claims to “openness”, it usually means “we’ll expose our API’s so YOU can work with US”, but in the case of the POWER processor platform IBM has pulled out all the stops. As a member of OpenPOWER, you can get access to everything—blueprints, code—anything you want going back as far as you want, plus participation in a completely collaborative environment designed to inspire and embrace outside participation. Too good to be true? Not at all, and over 60 companies have signed on as partners so far, with hopefully more to follow. Continue reading “The OpenPOWER Initiative May Actually Chart a Smarter Path for 64-Bit Computing” →