The State of Big Data
Follow On Tuesday I wrote about the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrants for business intelligence and analytics — then discovered I wasn’t the only one thinking about the state of Big Data and analytics this week. Writers around the Web have been taking a look at Big Data successes, failures and trends. Here I have five of the best examples of their work. Repurpose Big Data to Get More Analytics Bang for Your Bucks at TechRepublic: “There are two reasons why infusing value into big data is likely to be the next big data push once initial implementations are over. First,...
Read MoreWhat’s New in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrants for Business Intelligence and Analytics?
Follow Break out the popcorn and the lemonade folks, it’s that time of year again! A few days ago, Gartner released its 2014 Magic Quadrants — an analysis of business intelligence and analytics software – and this year is a doozy. The business intelligence and analytics software marketplace has, in my opinion, been a bit of a mess for the last few years. Reporting, data visualization and statistical inference have been hot on enterprise IT roadmaps – and there’s been no shortage of vendors out there offering software packages to handle those functions — but the...
Read MoreWhat Does a Data Scientist Do?
Follow There’s a running joke in data scientist circles that companies are looking for some magical, mythical unicorn of a data scientist who can snap her fingers and instantly materialize a stack of useful graphs and algorithms. There are at least two problems with these overblown expectations. First, no one person can do everything. And second, many companies don’t really understand what data scientists do or what they want to hire them to do. Last week, an email from a data scientist named Will started circulating the Internet. He applied, interviewed, and was rejected for...
Read MoreBig News on Big Data from Strata Conference 2014
Follow This week brought the O’Reilly Strata Conference 2014 in Santa Clara, Calif., where the Big Data and analytics industry rolled out new technology, programs and announcements on the growing data industry. ”We’ve seen companies like Cloudera hitting $70 million+ revenue last year, Hortonworks hitting $50 million, and MapR $30 million. These companies are starting to grow and accrue some significant revenue. That’s where the software is starting to catch up with the hardware,” said Jeff Kelly, Wikibon’s Principal Research Contributor. This week’s...
Read MoreBig Data is Booming and Everyone Wants in on the Business Analytics Game
Follow The Big Data craze just seems to be getting bigger and bigger — and with it is coming growth in demand for data scientists and other professionals with business analytics skills. For companies, “the key to big data is whether it’s going to give you actionable insights that you can then grow your business on,” says Xavier Amatriain, Netflix’s director of algorithms engineering. This week, I’m sharing five articles that explore what types of business analytics skills companies are going to need and what would-be data scientists can do to gain them. Big Data...
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