Enterprise big data and analytics cuts through the hype to make sense of data collection, storage, management, dissemination and discovery technologies, all employed collectively as a means of realizing corporate efficiencies and uncovering business opportunities.
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Though the new year dawns with monumental uncertainties for smart cities, a few flickering trends of yet-unknown strength and relevance seem to appear now on the horizon. Continue reading “Nascent Post-COVID Trends for Smart Cities”
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When the pandemic fades and conditions improve, the focus on COVID-19 will loosen and leave behind greater data literacy among the public. That’s good for data-driven smart cities — and it provides a more fertile environment for technology providers. Continue reading “Smart Cities: COVID-19’s Vaguely Silver Lining Is the Public’s New Comfort Level with Data”
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Take data analytics, predictive analytics, data visualization, AI, virtual reality, and gaming. Toss. The result could be a mess, but if developers skilled in each of these capabilities perform the ‘toss’ – either in a lavishly equipped lab or a garage – that mix might result in the game of the decade for decision makers. Continue reading “Prediction for the 2020s: AI, Analytics, VR, and Gaming Make a Decision Simulator”
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• Telecom service providers are looking to up the role they play in customers’ advanced analytics initiatives by offering services related to data preparation and project deployment and management.
• Mobile operators are eager to explore opportunities in the monetization of user information, but this must be done carefully and with an eye to regional regulations and privacy-related concerns.
Analytics is a hot area, with many organizations looking to leverage the wealth of information they collect to improve efficiency, enhance productivity, make more informed decisions, and improve the customer journey. However, there are many steps that need to be taken before data can actually yield the intended results. It must be collected, transported, curated, processed, and then visualized in order to provide value to end users. It’s a process that requires an ecosystem of vendors, and telcos are looking to expand the role they play. Their contribution to the transport component is obvious, but they are now looking to insert themselves in other parts of the process as well by offering services related to data preparation and project deployment and management. Continue reading “Telecom Operators Look to Increase Their Role in Enabling Advanced Analytics for Enterprises”
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The Tableau brand will survive longer than feared only a month ago. The recent Tableau Conference brought welcome news from Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky: Einstein Analytics will become part of Tableau and become known as Tableau CRM, making the Tableau brand a principal part of Salesforce.
So begins a new chapter in the Salesforce-Tableau epic. Tableau, the once mighty asteroid, the analytics universe’s dinosaur annihilator, has been tamed. Continue reading “One Chapter Ends in the Tableau-Salesforce Epic”
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• Oracle found the right time to market its scenario planning capabilities. Specialized vendors can also give good support, though few market for this planning method.
• The market for scenario planning support is ripe for new entries in a year of wildly discontinuous change.
Oracle has come out of the gate early with capabilities explicitly aimed at scenario planning — which in Oracle’s rendition of the classic method is at best a lightweight version that gets lost within the vendor’s rich planning ecosystem.
Whatever support Oracle offers for the venerable method is unclear. But at least it picked the right year to revive the name. True scenario planning would be useful to a business world that struggles to see its way past the pandemic. How does any business leader know which path offers the quickest, safest path? What if they bet on the wrong one? Continue reading “Oracle’s Scenario Planning is Early Out of the Gate, but Leaves Ample Room for Competition”
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Underneath all the buzz of technology marketing is the steady hum of stuff just working. Part of that hum seems to have always been Teradata, which has been around so long that the name even goes back to when a terabyte of data was impressive.
It’s been humming for so long that it carries a stale stereotype — propagated even by some people who should know better. They still say it offers only data storage. Never mind its strong, nimble analytics wares. Continue reading “Teradata Tries to Shake Off Its ‘Just a Storage Vendor’ Stereotype”
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• The new tool’s story-first approach may succeed in winning over the vast numbers of business users who never use data.
• The software maker, Toucan, should consider new messaging and take more seriously the threat from other vendors to imitate its approach.
How do you present data to those who would rather run away at the first sight of a dashboard? Multiple surveys over the years all come to a similar conclusion: roughly three quarters of business people feel this way. They could use data but never do. Now a product out of Paris, France works on a radical idea: message first, data second to deliver only what people “need to know.”
That data-second concept bucks the conventional assumption, that users want data to make their own observations and conclusions. And they want to drill down as far as questions may lead them.
Toucan Toco’s top down approach is absolutely not self-service. Presentations are created by authors, who are forced to simplify and focus data in a lockstep path with very few choices. Authors can’t even change fonts. Toucan Toco enforces simplicity.
Messages have such primacy that creators can actually sketch out a presentation with fake data to create placeholders for real data. That’s easy to do because Toco ignores an old assumption, that those engaged in data like to drill down. Toco gives them, as the product literature puts it, only what they “need to know.”
Toucan’s bold rejection of analytics industry dogma — self-service, data’s primacy, and almost infinite accommodation to a user’s inquiries — naturally inspires a question. What market is there? Continue reading “Story-First Data App Lands in North America, Tells ‘Only What You Need To Know’”
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Back at Tableau’s first release in 2004, many data analysts felt their hearts stir. Some had already dreamed of data analysis that went as deep and as fast as the mind could go, but now Tableau made it possible. All they needed then was access to the data inside IT’s vaults. But that access to data was a problem for many IT departments, and there began a long insurgency. Continue reading “Tableau Still Helps People See and Understand Data, but Which People?”
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• Alternative data, or alt data, can indicate new trends much faster than conventional data
• Alt data is for domain experts only
The dawning of new trends might be described as being “like a string hanging down from the future.” That’s how the renowned forecaster Paul Saffo described it. The future first presents itself like the “odd event you can’t get out of your mind [that] could be a weak signal of a distant industry-disrupting S curve…”
Everyone’s looking for signs of the future. What’s going to happen to us? Who will suffer? When will the economy recover? Eyes are peeled for that weak but portentous S-curve.
The trouble, of course, is the abundance of those hanging strings. The great challenge is to distinguish strings that have real prescience. That’s true in ordinary times, but it’s far more important during upheavals like COVID and the shaken economy to follow. Alt-data customers say standard financial indicators and statistical releases are too slow. Continue reading “Using Alt Data to Glimpse the Alt Future”
