Gigamon, a company that provides network traffic intelligence to security tools, that I’ve profiled before, announced the acquisition of ICEBRG, a Seattle-based security startup. Now, I receive press releases about acquisitions and mergers all the time, but I took particular notice of this one because it suggests that a theory of mine is beginning to be born out in reality. Over the past few years, both in my Forbes columns and on my research site,…
Snowflake Computing Inc., a San Mateo-based company, announced the availability of its data warehousing platform on Microsoft Azure. The evolution of the public cloud has disrupted the traditional software industry. During the last decade, almost every mainstream enterprise software platform became available in the cloud. This paradigm shift created new opportunities for the independent software vendors to build born-in-the-cloud applications and platforms that challenge the incumbents. Snowflake Computing is one of the first few…
Snowflake and Anodot announced a strategic partnership that brings predictive analytics to Snowflake’s enterprise data warehouse. With this integration, customers can discover anomalies in data streams and raise alerts in real-time. Snowflake Computing, a San Mateo-based startup, is one of the first few companies to realize the potential of building a native, cloud-based data warehouse. Founded in 2012, Snowflake exploited the capabilities of the cloud to design a SQL data warehouse from the ground up. Snowflake’s data…
Over 25 years ago, the average business was just becoming acquainted with how to effectively capture and store its data. Back then, data was used to help retail companies manage their inventories, enable commercial airlines to effectively maintain their flight schedules, and allow service-oriented businesses to capture and store their customer contact information. The pace was slower, and the information systems used to compute silo data queries were capable of delivering on time and on-premise.…
As technology evolves at a rapid rate – especially technology that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities – so too does the potential for bias, disconnect, misuse of data, and the automation of impersonal actions or decisions. With the vast amounts of data collected, stored, and exchanged, capitalist societies risk the commoditization of personal data at the expense of the individual, instead of using personal data to foster valuable individual and societal relationships. In business, AI…
Digital transformations often require real-time business processes driven by data from operational, historical and streaming sources. I’ve noticed that data and analytics leaders often use the terms “data warehouses,” “data lakes” and “data hubs” interchangeably, which can confuse nonspecialists seeking to understand their differences and the roles they play in digitally transformed businesses. Vendors often contribute to this confusion by positioning them as competing approaches, which can lead to deploying the wrong technology for an…
Data lakes are cool, but you don’t have to jump in head-first. It’s easy to start by dipping a toe: Integrating a legacy data warehouse into a data lake leverages the structured systems that have been built over the years while taking advantage of the ever-increasing volume of unstructured data across the organization. A Familiar Structure Data warehouses are familiar. Generally, IT teams know how to work with them. Over the past two decades, companies…
We can all agree on one thing: nobody likes to wait. When we go to the airport, we like our flights to be on time, and when we head to the grocery store, we want our ripe avocados to be in stock. Businesses don’t like to wait either: time is money. If a store is running low on avocados, the business wants to know as soon as possible, so they can get the restock process…
Gartner estimates that close to 70 to 80 percent of newly initiated business intelligence projects fail. This is due to myriad reasons, from bad tool choice to a lack of communication between IT and business stakeholders. Having successfully implemented BI projects across industries, I hope to share my experiences in this blog post and highlight key reasons why business intelligence projects fail. This article will present counter-measures to failure based on three principles that should govern…
To be a successful relative company in the 21st century, analytics is no longer an option, but a requirement. Yet, with all of the conflicting information out there, how do you know where to start, or what to believe? This article serves to give you a real world road map for running a successful business intelligence/analytics team. There are 1001 different tactics that relate to this subject and probably 10 times that many products and vendors.…
