KM/Storage / Features

A centralized analytics practice at this 2015 Data+ Editors' Choice Awards honoree puts together a portfolio of projects and uncovers $720 million in value

This real-time index, created by a 2015 Data+ Editors' Choice Award honoree, inventories the world's ‘events, emotions and narratives' every 15 minutes

Analyzing multiple streams of data helps this 2015 Data+ Editors' Choice Awards honoree determine the best routes for delivery truck drivers

The Collaborative Cancer Cloud will leverage big data analytics to help medical institutions sequence individuals' DNA and develop a precision treatment plan in 24 hours.

Logic. Stats. Cold calculations. That's what it takes to win at fantasy football. Or is it? After all, football is as much a game of passionate intensity as it is a chess-like mental contest. That's why Edge Up Sports is teaming up with IBM as an IBM Watson Ecosystem partner to deliver an app that tackles players' emotional feels alongside a host of other stats and analyses to provide fantasy football players with an expert adviser.

Building a successful team goes beyond hiring charismatic leaders. You need to balance strengths and weaknesses at the board room table. Kathy Harris, managing director of Harris Allied, a firms that provides executive search services, likens it to the "charismatic leaders" in the NFL. She noticed the similarities between a winning NFL team and IT team by watching her brother-in-law Franco Harris, former NFL player and Pro Football Hall of Famer, get recruited.

Among all the talk of rookies, holdouts, fresh starts and, of course, the never-ending Deflategate conversation, there's buzz around a new topic at NFL training camps this year: virtual reality (VR). Several teams in the NFL are testing VR during summer practices in hopes of giving players new perspectives, in-depth data during film studies and a leg up on the competition.

1.The concept is still quite new. The term data lake, credited to Pentaho CTO James Dixon, has been bandied about for several years. But the idea of data lakes as corporate resources is still in its infancy, according to IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni. A data lake is defined as a massive--and relatively cheap--storage repository, such as Hadoop, that can hold all types of data until it is needed for business analytics or data mining. A data lake holds data in its rawest form, unprocessed and ungoverned.

Studies show that around 40% of products fail. But what if product designers could understand what features are most and least popular, which components tend to fail sooner than others, and how customers actually use products versus how designers think they use them? And, what if product developers could then utilize these insights to develop products that perform better, potentially cost less and, most importantly, are aligned with actual customer needs?

Most enterprise technology eventually converges into a suite, as it did with ERP. Integration hassles, management headaches and training challenges arising from a mishmash of best-of-breed solutions drive frustrated enterprise software buyers to the suite life -- but not in marketing tech, at least not yet.

Drones and virtual reality (VR) both have barriers to overcome before they see widespread adoption in the enterprise and consumer worlds. Professional sports organizations are taking the lead and working hard to overcome those initial challenges. Teams are always looking for any competitive edge, in the stadium and in business, and part of that is to constantly test new technologies. But can drones and VR translate into real value?

The recent Demo Traction event showcased a host of young companies that are gaining market momentum.  Each gave their pitch and then answered to a panel of judges.  If it is important for you to stay on the up and up with emerging technologies, this is must watch stuff.

Most financial service firms, which includes banking and insurance companies, are engaged in a big data project to increase the pace of innovation and uncover game-changing business outcomes. The pressing challenge now is how to drive more continuous value and unearth opportunities more rapidly. 

In these heady days of Big Data, a lot of organisations treat data collection like a Pokémon game: Gotta catch it all. But Dane Atkinson, CEO of cross-platform marketing analytics specialist, SumAll, says most organizations need to think wide, not big, when it comes to data.

At the Strata big data conference yesterday, Microsoft let the world know its Azure Machine Learning offering was generally available to developers. This may come as a surprise. Microsoft? Isn't machine learning the province of Google or Facebook or innumerable hot startups?

Big data and analytics in 2015 will be less about collecting everything and anything and more about focusing on the most relevant data for actionable insights, according to analysts.

The newest buzzword in IT is digital enterprise – a company with all-digital customer interactions, processes, jobs and information that's fast and easy to access. A panel of CIOs and a CMO at the recent CIO Perspectives Chicago event to talk about how companies are becoming fully digital and addressing the challenges associated with it.

There is a festival atmosphere here at the 2014 U.S. Open tennis tournament as hundreds of thousands of fans gather to see tennis stars and up-and-comers alike vie for prize at the last Grand Slam competition of the tennis year.

Historically, cloud BI has been mostly used by smaller businesses, but larger enterprises are starting to make the trek.

According to Gartner, business Intelligence and analytics will remain a top focus for CIOs through 2017, with companies spending millions on traditional BI software, cloud BI services and now mobile apps and even social BI. However, as the type and number of BI solutions has grown, so too has the possibility of failure, of picking the wrong business intelligence software for your business problem or problems or of having end users not understand or properly use the solution.