E-guide
Top 10 information management stories of 2019
Top 10 information management
stories of 2019
In this e-guide In this e-guide:
MapR collapse into HPE Consolidation and acquisition marked the supplier side of the harbinger of big data tech IT industry in respect of information management in 2019. trough of despair? Hadoop distributors Cloudera and Hortonworks sealed their marriage, announced in 2018, while on the business Tableau sticking to data intelligence (BI) and analytics side of the market, Tableau was mission under Salesforce sold to Salesforce, and the sale of Looker to Google was also
Google buys Looker to announced. And MapR, the third of the most prominent deepen enterprise software distributors of big data storage system Hadoop, collapsed into arsenal HPE.
Silicon Valley startups look to On the user side of the market, we saw the continued search for plug gaps in data value chain business value from the big data revolution that has been proceeding since at least the birth of Hadoop in 2006. Computer Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Weekly was represented on a springtime visit to Silicon Valley, where we discovered a group of companies attempting address How modern business gaps in the value chain from data sources to business insight. intelligence shapes up to big data That visit also provoked the question: what is the balance, for enterprise IT, between complementing and replacing traditional
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databases? An article by Lindsay Clark assayed an answer to In this e-guide that question later in the year.
MapR collapse into HPE The question of how modern BI and analytics software – harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? roughly speaking, software that post-dates the heyday of traditional BI software in the early 2000s – shapes up to non- Tableau sticking to data relational big data is addressed and suggests that data mission under Salesforce integration is the enduring, difficult problem for CIOs to solve.
Google buys Looker to Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 information management deepen enterprise software stories of 2019. arsenal Brian McKenna, business applications editor Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain
Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?
How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data
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In this e-guide MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big MapR collapse into HPE data tech trough of despair? harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
The final collapse of big data firm MapR into HPE could be read as a particular Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce fate. But might it also be a sign of things to come for those suppliers that sprang into life around the Hadoop family of big data storage technologies around a decade ago? Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Hadoop was, and is an open source distributed processing framework that arsenal manages data processing and storage for big data applications running in clustered systems, on commodity servers. Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain It was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella, initially to support processing in the Nutch open source search engine. After Google published Alternative databases set for technical papers detailing its Google File System (GFS) and the MapReduce mainstream adoption? programming framework in 2003 and 2004, Cutting and Cafarella developed a Java-based MapReduce implementation and a file system modeled on How modern business Google's. This they called Hadoop, famously after Cutting’s son’s toy elephant. intelligence shapes up to big data
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MapR, the company, was commonly seen as the third horse – or should that be In this e-guide elephant? – in a race with Cloudera and Hortonworks. The latter two have merged, while MapR has, essentially, gone out of business. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech It was announced on Monday 5 August that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) trough of despair? has acquired all MapR assets for an undisclosed sum. HPE has said it will use MapR’s technology for its own Intelligent Data Platform, which is a basis for Tableau sticking to data artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications. mission under Salesforce “MapR’s file system technology enables HPE to offer a complete portfolio of products to drive artificial intelligence and analytics applications and strengthens Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software our ability to help customers manage their data assets end to end, from edge to arsenal cloud,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.
MapR’s distinction – as against the other two main Hadoop distributors – was Silicon Valley startups look to that it eschewed the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) in favour of its plug gaps in data value chain own, and had, more widely, more defensible intellectual property in its armoury. It wasn’t only based on open source, which was and is the case with Alternative databases set for Hortonworks – entirely open source – and Cloudera – less so than the company mainstream adoption? it has merged with, but more so than MapR.
How modern business MapR’s distinction was that it eschewed the Hadoop Distributed File System in favour intelligence shapes up to big of its own, and had more defensible intellectual property in its armoury data
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It seemed a plausible case, often ably articulated by Ted Dunning, chief In this e-guide application architect at MapR.
MapR collapse into HPE But for most of this year, MapR has teetered on the verge of collapse. In a letter harbinger of big data tech to employees and a notice MapR filed on 13 May with California’s Employment trough of despair? Development Department, the company said it would shut down its headquarters in Santa Clara and terminate 122 employees there if necessary Tableau sticking to data funding wasn’t obtained by 14 June. mission under Salesforce It has now submerged into HPE.
Google buys Looker to James Curtis, senior analyst, data, AI & analytics, 451 Research, says “it makes deepen enterprise software a lot of sense for MapR to land at HPE, particular given that MapR has its data arsenal fabric offering based on its proprietary file system, making it a good match for a storage vendor. The MapR technology has been solid, so it comes down to HPE Silicon Valley startups look to pulling off the right execution strategy to make this work. plug gaps in data value chain “Customers are likely glad that MapR found a buyer first and foremost. Next Alternative databases set for there would be concern about the roadmap and future updates, which HPE has mainstream adoption? indicated they will continue to deliver”.
How modern business Moving beyond Hadoop intelligence shapes up to big data Meanwhile, the merged Cloudera/Hortonworks outfit has not experienced plain sailing in 2019. CEO Tom Reilly and Cloudera co-founder and chief strategy officer Mike Olson have left the company, with first quarter revenue of
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$187m only slightly up on the $182m combined revenues of Cloudera and In this e-guide Hortonworks for the same year-ago quarter, as noted by The Register in June. Reilly conceded, in a financial analyst call, that the merger had created MapR collapse into HPE uncertainty among both sets of customers. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Cutting, chief technology officer of Cloudera, and co-inventor of Hadoop, in an interview with Computer Weekly earlier this year, expressed confidence that the Tableau sticking to data new Cloudera would ultimately find a path to growth, because it was not fatally mission under Salesforce wedded to any one data storage or database technology.
He said the company was a data technology company that had moved on from Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Hadoop. He also expressed no sympathy for open source-based database or arsenal data storage suppliers, which would be prone to cry “foul” when and if the public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft – package up
Silicon Valley startups look to their capabilities into cloud services. MongoDB did this earlier in 2019. plug gaps in data value chain “If something is freely licensed, and someone uses it without paying, that is things working out as designed. If you are angry about that, then that is a form Alternative databases set for of lunacy,” said Cutting. mainstream adoption? As for Hadoop’s seeming eclipse, he said: “People saw the open source model How modern business was successful and built things around Hadoop to the degree that while it is not intelligence shapes up to big quite obsolete, it is getting there over time. MapReduce is mostly inferior to data Spark, for example. HDFS is still a great file system, but as we see more of a shift to cloud, and spinning up clusters on demand, you might be building on S3
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as your storage. And Yarn is needed much less as you are using public or In this e-guide private cloud, because you are no longer time sharing on the cluster, but bringing up dedicated clusters that are short-lived per application, so the need MapR collapse into HPE for a scheduler is lessened. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? “With our model, we are happy to move and adopt new technologies, since the customers are not paying for the technologies themselves, and so there is no Tableau sticking to data need for us, as a vendor, to keep them trapped in a licence.” mission under Salesforce And while Cutting did not mention MapR by name, he said it was hard to see companies such as Mongo, Databricks, Elastic or Confluent apart from their Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software particular technologies. “They are single technology companies – it is hard to arsenal imagine Confluent without Kafka, or Databricks without Spark, and so on. We are trying to provide a set of tools to solve a particular set of problems and
Silicon Valley startups look to those tools will evolve,” he said. plug gaps in data value chain Has MapR, by staking its ground on having its own proprietary intellectual property, lost out, and will Cloudera, by being more aligned with open source, Alternative databases set for prove comparatively more successful? Or are all these big data technology mainstream adoption? firms that emerged to do Hadoop distribution a decade or so ago now entering a trough of disillusionment? How modern business intelligence shapes up to big “Probably not”, says the 451’s Curtis. “A lot of it is how the market is shifting and data settling. There’s still some demand for Hadoop and similar distributed data-
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processing frameworks, but the majority appears to be moving to the cloud, of In this e-guide course”.
MapR collapse into HPE Nevertheless, is hard to resist the cliché: time will tell. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair?
Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce
Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software arsenal
Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain
Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?
How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data
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In this e-guide Tableau sticking to data mission under MapR collapse into HPE Salesforce harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
Tableau president and CEO Adam Selipsky told the company’s European Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce customers and partners at a conference that the recently announced acquisition by Salesforce will not affect its mission of “seeing and understanding data”. The Tableau name will also persist, and he and his top leadership team will remain Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software in place. arsenal The Tableau Conference Europe, being held in Berlin, is the data visualisation supplier’s first event since the acquisition was announced on 10 June. Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain James Eiloart, senior vice-president of Tableau EMEA, who interviewed Selipsky onstage as part of the first-day keynote session, disclosed that Alternative databases set for Tableau runs its own sales and marketing operation on Salesforce. mainstream adoption? He also announced Blueprint, a codification of Tableau best practices garnered
How modern business from the supplier’s customer base. It was described in a press statement as “a intelligence shapes up to big step-by-step guide to support customers as they deploy and scale Tableau and data work towards establishing a data culture of their own”.
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Eiloart interviewed Tableau customer Homa Siddiqui, head of digital In this e-guide transformation at Credit Suisse, who described how the bank balanced control and innovation in building a data culture. “Without data, you are just another MapR collapse into HPE person with an opinion,” she said. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? CEO Selipsky revealed the names of customers that have contributed experiences to what has become the Blueprint codification, including BNP Tableau sticking to data Paribas, JLL, Credit Suisse, Schneider Electric, Lufthansa and JP Morgan. mission under Salesforce In further reference to the Salesforce acquisition, he said it would be a “new chapter” for Tableau, and that he was “dreaming” about the possibilities of Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software combining his company’s technology with Salesforce’s artificial intelligence arsenal capability Einstein and its integration software acquired with Mulesoft – as well as having Tableau being surfaced within the Salesforce clouds, such as Service
Silicon Valley startups look to Cloud and Sales Cloud. plug gaps in data value chain Francois Ajenstat, Tableau’s chief product officer, rounded off the keynote by announcing some product enhancements, including Explain Data, which uses Alternative databases set for machine learning to add contextual explanations to data visualisations. mainstream adoption? “Explain Data will join Ask Data as the latest addition to a growing portfolio of ‘smart’ features in the Tableau platform,” the company said. “To help customers How modern business more quickly understand the ‘Why?’ behind their data, Explain Data is a new, intelligence shapes up to big AI-powered capability that automatically uncovers and provides explanations for data the value of a specific data point.”
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In a demo of Explain Data, product manager Bethany Lyons presented it as In this e-guide enabling users to ask the next question. “It’s like a trained data scientist guiding you through your analysis,” she said. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech trough of despair?
Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce
Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software arsenal
Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain
Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?
How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data
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In this e-guide Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise MapR collapse into HPE software arsenal harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
In a move that could signal the fleshing out of Google’s cloud enterprise Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce applications strategy under former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian, Google has announced its intention to buy Looker, a business intelligence (BI) platform supplier. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software On the close of the $2.6bn all-cash acquisition, Looker will join Google Cloud. arsenal The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will add what the companies described Silicon Valley startups look to in a joint statement as a “comprehensive analytics solution – from ingesting and plug gaps in data value chain integrating data to gain insights, to embedded analytics and visualisations.
Alternative databases set for Looker CEO Frank Bien has positioned his company as part of a third wave of mainstream adoption? BI more attuned to big data stores than what he has depicted as the first wave of reporting tools – such as Cognos, BusinessObjects, and Microstrategy – and
How modern business the second wave of data visualisation software of Tableau and Qlik. intelligence shapes up to big data Google itself has been one of the Silicon Valley giants that has incubated big data technologies, such as MapReduce, which was an important part of the Hadoop family of data storage technologies.
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“We are excited to welcome Looker to Google Cloud and look forward to In this e-guide working together to help our customers solve some of their biggest challenges,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said: “Google Cloud is being used by trough of despair? many of the leading organisations in the world for analytics and decision - making. The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to Tableau sticking to data harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation.” mission under Salesforce Frank Bien added: “The combination of Looker and Google Cloud advances our mission that we undertook from the beginning – to empower humans through Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software the smarter use of data.” arsenal Frank Gens, senior vice-president and chief analyst at IDC, said in the Google and Looker statement: “The data analytics market is growing incredibly fast as Silicon Valley startups look to companies look to leverage all of their data to make more informed decisions. plug gaps in data value chain “Google Cloud is one of the leaders in the data warehouse market, and the Alternative databases set for addition of Looker will further strengthenits ability to serve the needs of mainstream adoption? enterprise customers while also advancing its commitment to multi-cloud.”
How modern business The two companies claim to share more than 350 joint customers, such as intelligence shapes up to big Buzzfeed, Hearst, King, Sunrun, WPP Essence, and Yahoo. data
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In this e-guide Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in MapR collapse into HPE data value chain harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
The classic strategic management model of the “value chain”, made famous by Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Michael Porter, can be applied to data.
Each point in the chain adds something new: something of value. In the context Google buys Looker to of data work, you start off with raw data, then it goes through stages of deepen enterprise software refinement before it results, finally, in insight that is significant. For a company, arsenal contributing either to making money or saving money.
Silicon Valley startups look to So far, so simple. Except it’s not. plug gaps in data value chain Computer Weekly was represented on a recent European IT press visit to
Alternative databases set for business applications and data analytics companies in San Francisco and mainstream adoption? Silicon Valley.
As often, but not always, hints about the future shape of UK corporate IT can be How modern business seen in what’s coming out of new and relatively new technology companies in intelligence shapes up to big data northern California.
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Five of the companies visited on the recent tour are tackling stages in what In this e-guide could be called the “value chain” of taking raw data to final analytical value: Fivetran, Promethium, Alation, DataGrail, and Anaplan. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech Fivetran: Get data pipelines out of the ‘90s trough of despair?
Tableau sticking to data George Fraser, CEO of Oakland-based extract, load and transform (ELT) data mission under Salesforce company Fivetran, said he and his co-founder and chief operations officer Taylor Brown were “baffled” as to why data cannot be easily extracted from
Google buys Looker to source systems and loaded into data warehouses and data lakes. deepen enterprise software arsenal Their focus is on cloud data warehouses, such as Snowflake, and their belief is that the pipeline stage of the data stack is still stuck in the 1990s, while data storage and analytics have moved on. The company’s closest strategic Silicon Valley startups look to partnerships are, it says, with Google Cloud, Snowflake and BI platform provider plug gaps in data value chain Looker.
Alternative databases set for The company was founded in 2012, has 600 customers, 110 employees and 12 mainstream adoption? office dogs. It opened an EMEA office in Dublin in January 2018.
How modern business The company’s name is a play on Fortran, a computing language that will evoke intelligence shapes up to big nostalgia in the minds of many Computer Weekly readers. It was, however, just data a holding name while the company’s founders looked for a business technology problem to solve, then build, a company around.
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And they believe they have found it. Their thesis is that a good deal has In this e-guide changed in the end-to-end data stack, the advent and growth of cloud computing and the plunging cost of storage. MapR collapse into HPE Modern data warehouses are, on this view, cloud-based, columnar in data harbinger of big data tech architecture, with computer separated from storage. But extract, transform and trough of despair? load (ETL) has, in their view, not changed in almost two decades.
Tableau sticking to data Data warehousing has through the Hadoop revolution into the cloud, while, at mission under Salesforce the other end of the value chain, BI has gone from the reporting tools generation of Business Objects, Cognos and Microstrategy through self-service BI to what Google buys Looker to they term “centralised, cloud-native, self-service” BI. deepen enterprise software arsenal Fraser also counsels traditional companies against modelling themselves on the vanguard of companies with “exotic data needs, like Netflix. For the median
Silicon Valley startups look to company the cost of storage is not a concern, really. Getting people to look at plug gaps in data value chain the data is the hard part.”
Striking fire from data: Promethium Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Prometheus was the Greek god who bestowed the gift of fire upon mankind. Kaycee Lai, CEO and founder of Promethium, based in Menlo Park, hopes to How modern business set fire to the many stages that lie between discovering a data source and intelligence shapes up to big running a query that will yield a relevant insight to a business. data
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The thesis of the company is that steps like determining access, ingesting and In this e-guide integrating data, selecting relevant subsets of data and then assembling those for query can be collapsed. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech “Some 90% of the cost of business intelligence is labour. You’re never sure if trough of despair? the data is right until you get to the query stage,” says Lai. “In the meantime, you have expended several months of time on the labour of business analysts, Tableau sticking to data IT professionals, data scientists, DBAs, and so on. That is where the bottleneck mission under Salesforce is: someone has to figure out the mess.
“We think you need to change the process from the beginning. Instead of Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software starting from the bottom, and finding all possible data sources, start from: ‘what arsenal question can I answer?’”
His firm’s software, he said, presents the user with a menu of questions to ask, Silicon Valley startups look to automatically joins data across all sources – he cites a Teradata data plug gaps in data value chain warehouse, an Oracle database, a Hadoop data lake as typical – and leaves the user to run the query and validate the results of that. Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? He said while it typically takes 180 days labour to aggregate data across all sources, with Promethium it takes six; and that while it takes 360 days labour to How modern business “determine accurate context”, it takes one day with their software. intelligence shapes up to big data “I love data catalogues, but this is a different thing”, he added. “Anyone can search a file system, but that doesn’t mean you know what is in it. That was the
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big ‘Aha!’ moment for me [when deciding to set up the company]: ‘how is a In this e-guide human being supposed to make sense of data at a necessary level of abstraction, such as ‘how many gilets did we sell in London last year?’ Shouldn’t MapR collapse into HPE I be able to just ask a question, rather than figure out how to form a SQL harbinger of big data tech statement, which is an unnatural procedure?” trough of despair? Alation: Surfacing the social graph among knowledge workers Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Data catalogue vendor Alation – not a new company to the tour – continues, on co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani’s account to continue its endeavours to make customers’ investments in big data technology and personnel work better Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software than they have been doing so far. arsenal The thesis of the company, based in Redwood City, is that digital transformations fail because of the lack of a data culture in complex Silicon Valley startups look to organisations, and that data catalogue technology is a catalyst for making the plug gaps in data value chain social graph within such organisations visible to knowledge workers: to know who else has been looking at what. And they apply machine learning to how Alternative databases set for data stores are used to translate “data speak into plain English” (as a metaphor mainstream adoption? for natural language, the supplier’s software is not restricted to English).
How modern business “The reason why we think the data catalogue is key is that we have to transform intelligence shapes up to big not just the tools that knowledge workers use, but how they thin k: adopting a data scientific mind set. And leveraging AI not just in the end products people are
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using, but in the workflows of how they are doing their jobs on a day-to-day In this e-guide basis, and making them more data literate.
MapR collapse into HPE “Our growth, from 200 to 400 employees, and with a broad customer base in big harbinger of big data tech global enterprises, shows why that is important.” trough of despair? Customers include Ebay, MunichRe, Pfizer, BMW, and SurveyMonkey. MunichRe has, he says, used Alation on a data lake to launch a new green Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce energy business, deploying some 2,000 actuaries, analysts, and data scientists.
“We apply machine learning to translate data speak, the things in the technical Google buys Looker to systems, into English to surface stuff like: ‘who has touched the data, how often deepen enterprise software has this question been asked’ and so on.” arsenal DataGrail: Managing data in the “age of privacy” Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain Daniel Barber, CEO, DataGrail founded the San Mateo based startup with the wave of data privacy compliance – signified by the GDPR in Europe and the
Alternative databases set for CCPA in California – in mind. mainstream adoption? The idea behind the company is to operate at a meta level vis-à-vis the personal data in business applications in order to make its use compliant, responding to How modern business requests for deletion, and so on. And its philosophy is avowedly a direct counter intelligence shapes up to big data to Mark Zuckerberg’s famous 2010 edict that privacy is dead, says Barber.
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Large companies, especially, he said will run a plethora of software as a service In this e-guide marketing systems: Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, and the rest. Managing personal data across business systems is increasingly problematic. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech Barber claims his company’s software makes handling data requests a simpler trough of despair? task. Their “request manager” system receives such requests on their client’s behalf, and “automatically performs access, delete, portability, or other privacy Tableau sticking to data requests” across a gamut of CRM applications. They then email the requestor mission under Salesforce after the company has reviewed the output, and store a compliance log for internal and auditor review. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Barber’s background includes stints at Responsys and Node.io where he met arsenal his co-founders, Earl Hathaway and Ignacio Zendejas – each of whom have built machine learning systems at companies including Quantcast and
Silicon Valley startups look to Facebook. plug gaps in data value chain “We all observed that businesses use a number of SaaS [software-as-a-service] systems to run their business. At Datanyse, I saw we tracked all the systems Alternative databases set for that businesses would use on their web sites, and it is not in single digits.” mainstream adoption? Anaplan: Connecting dots How modern business intelligence shapes up to big Like Alation, Anaplan is not new to this particular Silicon Valley IT press tour. data Nor is it a startup or even an early stage company: it is public and has moved
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into a much bigger office in San Francisco than the one where this tour In this e-guide encountered it on previous visits.
MapR collapse into HPE Nevertheless, its focus on providing software as a service to enable its harbinger of big data tech customers to do business planning, using data in a more connected way, fits the trough of despair? theme of generating value from raw data. And putting spreadsheets to the sword into the bargain. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce The supplier now says it has 1,100 customers in 46 countries and $240m in its most recent annual revenue statement. Their estimate is that 81% of companies worldwide use spreadsheets as a primary planning tool and 72% are still reliant Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software on on-premises software. So, they see scope for further growth. arsenal Ed Tang, vice-president of strategic finance, business analytics and go-to- market operations at Box, presented on the IT Press Tour and testified: “Before Silicon Valley startups look to we implemented Anaplan, we used spreadsheets for planning functions in both plug gaps in data value chain Sales and Finance.
Alternative databases set for “These were often massive files that existed in hundreds of versions and were mainstream adoption? painfully slow to open. Now we have a trusted, easy-to-use, cloud-based platform for broader collaboration, improved alignment across departments and How modern business better decision-making”. intelligence shapes up to big data Data may be the new oil, but it looks like the refining process needs more work if companies and organisations are to get business value from it.
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In this e-guide Alternative databases set for mainstream MapR collapse into HPE adoption? harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Lindsay Clark,
With its famous red-coated service staff and reputation for family fun, Butlin’s is Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce a holiday firm steeped in British seaside traditions. But it must also move with the times. Although it takes orders online, the business feared its website performance was not up to scratch. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software “Probably the biggest complaint from the businesses was that pages weren’t arsenal snappy,” says John Hegarty, head of solution design and delivery, Bourne Leisure, which own Butlin’s, along with Haven Holidays and Warner Leisure Silicon Valley startups look to Hotels. “People have a certain website dwell time, but any longer and they’re plug gaps in data value chain not going to hang about.”
Alternative databases set for To speed up its customer experience, Bourne Leisure turned to Redis Labs, a mainstream adoption? distributor of the database of the same name. Redis is one of a group of databases, including GridGain, which offers alternative architecture and How modern business improved performance over relational databases. Analysts say they are set to intelligence shapes up to big shake up the thinking of senior IT management when it comes to the enterprise data database strategy.
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Hegarty says he was attracted to Redis because it gave Bourne Leisure the In this e-guide opportunity to boost website performance without replacing the back-end booking engine based on Delphi, a common hotel reservation system based on MapR collapse into HPE the Pascal programming language. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? “It’s a business rule-based system,” he says. “Every time you go and ask for a price, it executes a whole bunch of business rules, which is incredibly flexible for Tableau sticking to data us. But that does mean it’s slow getting a price.” mission under Salesforce As part of a technology refresh, Hegarty’s team built a new caching layer between the booking engine and the website. It serves web users prices from Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software the cache while they search the website. When they come to book, the system arsenal draws prices from the reservation engine.
Bourne Leisure already had a caching layer to serve up web prices, based on Silicon Valley startups look to Microsoft SQL Server, but it did not provide enough performance, says Hegarty. plug gaps in data value chain In 2017, the holiday company started a project to refresh its web technology Alternative databases set for across all its main businesses and the team took it as an opportunity to look mainstream adoption? again at the caching database.
How modern business “We were on very old technology,” he says. “It was a very ancient Java stack intelligence shapes up to big which was really hard to maintain. But because we were that far behind, it was a data good opportunity for us to embrace some new ideas.”
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Among them was the chance to review NoSQL and in-memory databases. The In this e-guide team opted to work with Redis Labs to build the distributed, in -memory key- value database into the caching system. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech This was not the first time the company had looked at in -memory technology. trough of despair? “We’ve had a play with them in the past, but they seemed too complex and too difficult for us to use,” says Hegarty. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce After an introduction to Redis Labs and its enterprise Redis database, Hegarty was assured the technology was business-ready and by the offer of 24-hour support. “That ticked the boxes, which some of the other products wouldn’t have Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software because they were just open source,” he says. arsenal “The features we got out of the box were excellent, especially the management features. The support team that looked after our production systems, and Silicon Valley startups look to installed our application layers, were great on site.” plug gaps in data value chain The new caching database sits within an application programming interface Alternative databases set for (API) layer linking it to the front-end website and the back-end booking system. mainstream adoption? Although the legacy system would not allow the leap to a microservices architecture, the company was able to adopt a “mini-services” approach where How modern business reservation API agents can act on behalf of web users. The system is scalable intelligence shapes up to big with up to 40 agents operating at one time, says Hegarty. data On Bourne Leisure’s own testing, the new system is a least 10 times faster than the old, although the user experience is more difficult to compare because there
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was not a like-for-like change in interface. Hegarty says it has been an In this e-guide “incredible success” given the number of new technologies the company adopted in a single leap. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech “It was quite a big risk for us going from legacy to all these new techn ologies,” trough of despair? says Hegarty. “There was a React JavaScript website application, we were moving to a Microsoft Azure cloud, we were doing APIs and endpoints that we Tableau sticking to data wrote ourselves. There was a lot of technology change and everything relied on mission under Salesforce Redis. But the business is incredibly happy. It’s been a major success.”
The success is shifting the organisation’s approach to selecting database Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software technologies for future projects. Whereas it would previously default to relational arsenal databases, now it would only select them when there is a good reason to do so, he says.
Silicon Valley startups look to “It has opened up to a whole world of possibilities – it has been an eye-opener plug gaps in data value chain for the team,” says Hegarty. “We now have a cloud-first strategy, and with that, where needed, we look for in-memory solutions, or other things that give us that Alternative databases set for same kind of performance.” mainstream adoption? For example, the team is currently considering the cloud-based Snowflake How modern business enterprise data warehouse system as an upgrade option, says Hegarty. intelligence shapes up to big data
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Alternatives to relational In this e-guide Bourne Leisure is not alone in considering alternatives to relational databases.
MapR collapse into HPE NoSQL and in-memory databases are maturing as viable enterprise technology, harbinger of big data tech says Matt Aslett, vice-president data, AI and analytics, at 451 Research. trough of despair? “In-memory distributed data layers – including data caching and distributed data grid processing –were initially adopted in industries with the highest latency Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce sensitivity, including financial services and telecoms, as well as internet applications,” he says, “but adoption has spread to other industries, including e- commerce, healthcare and IoT [internet of things].” Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Some large enterprises have now standardised on distributed data-grid arsenal products as their primary data-processing tier, relegating the database to the role of persistent storage. NoSQL databases were initially deployed to serve Silicon Valley startups look to applications that were ill-suited to relational databases, but have also matured plug gaps in data value chain to support some of the functional requirements, such as transactional consistency, that mean they can be considered potential direct alternatives to Alternative databases set for relational databases. mainstream adoption? Alongside improving the core functionality of their products, they have also How modern business taken steps to address enterprise concerns about support, security and intelligence shapes up to big scalability, for example, says Aslett. data
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“We do see emerging databases playing an increasing role for new application In this e-guide development projects and there is considerable growth for new approaches,” he adds. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech NoSQL database revenue will grow by 27% a year between 2018 and 2023, trough of despair? while distributed data grid/cache product revenue is expected to grow by 23%, according to 451 Research. By comparison, the relational database market is Tableau sticking to data set to grow at only 6% over the same period. mission under Salesforce “However, the relational database continues to dominate the enterprise database landscape, especially given the ongoing reliance on existing Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software applications, and is expected to still account for more than three-quarters of all arsenal operational database revenue in 2023,” says Aslett.
Redis, an open source software released under the BSD 3-clause licence, dates Silicon Valley startups look to back to 2009. It is a key-value database and is unusual in that it provides a data plug gaps in data value chain model where user commands do not describe a query to be executed by the database engine, as in relational database management systems, but the Alternative databases set for operations performed on data types. As a result, data must be stored in a way mainstream adoption? that is suitable for fast retrieval later.
How modern business Howard Ting, chief marketing officer at Redis Labs, says its in -memory features intelligence shapes up to big make Redis suitable to the modern application stack. “In the next five years, as data organisations continue to move to microservices, storing data in a traditional relational database does not make sense,” he says.
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As event-based communications such as microservices find larger adoption, a In this e-guide faster, more responsive database integrated with the cloud is vital, he adds.
MapR collapse into HPE GridGain data fabric harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? GridGain is also an in-memory database, but it differs from Redis. Founded in 2005, it is an open source in-memory data fabric, licensed via the Apache Software Foundation. GridGain is infrastructure software that sits between data Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce obligations and data sources in way that boosts performance and scalability, proponents say.
Google buys Looker to Terry Erisman, executive vice-president, marketing and alliances, at GridGain deepen enterprise software Systems, says the approach found a footing in financial services, where arsenal Citibank and ING are among the customers, but over the last five years, adoption has spread into other vertical sectors. He says a merchant payment Silicon Valley startups look to system that took three days to clear running on a mainframe-based relational plug gaps in data value chain database took three hours when moved to a new architecture supported by GridGain. Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Gridgain can also help with data analytics, says Erisman. “It bridges the gap between the data lake and the operational data store. Combining GridGain with How modern business Apache Spark, you can perform analytics on real-time business processes.” intelligence shapes up to big data Relational databases still dominate mainstream business applications, but the growing maturity and adoption of alternatives, such as NoSQL and in-memory
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database technologies, will make IT leaders pause for thought. The move to In this e-guide event-based services architectures is set to prompt a review of the latest options. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech trough of despair?
Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce
Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software arsenal
Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain
Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?
How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data
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In this e-guide How modern business intelligence shapes MapR collapse into HPE up to big data harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
How have corporate business intelligence (BI) strategies evolved in recent Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce years in the face of big data? Have companies and other organisations changed their BI tool choices and the ways they set up their teams and technical architectures as data volumes have increased and become less structured, Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software more “messy”? arsenal Here, we first get a CEO-level perspective from two founder-executives at opposite ends of the spectrum of opinion, then some counsel from an analyst Silicon Valley startups look to perspective, followed by testimony from three user organisations: building plug gaps in data value chain society Nationwide, investment management company Schroders and games company King. Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Three waves of BI or startup special pleading?
How modern business Frank Bien, CEO of business intelligence platform supplier Looker, laid out the intelligence shapes up to big thesis of his company to Computer Weekly in 2017, contending that the rise of data Hadoop and NoSQL databases had superseded prior generations of BI technology.
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Bien’s narrative of business intelligence involves three waves of BI. The first In this e-guide was the big monolithic stacks: Business Objects, Cognos and Microstrategy. “What you got there were complete systems – and you spent a lot of time MapR collapse into HPE ‘manicuring the lawn’. By that I mean databases were slow, and were built to do harbinger of big data tech transactions, not analytics. When you wanted to ask a question, you had to trough of despair? reorganise the data physically,” he says. And that, he maintains, became rigid and inflexible. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce The second phase was one of “blowing up that stack”, about seven years ago. “There were small tools raining out of the sky to do things separately, like data Google buys Looker to preparation or visualisation. And, as vendors, we said to customers: ‘You put all deepen enterprise software that together’,” he says. This, in his view, was the era of Qlik and Tableau. arsenal “At the same time, there was a revolution in data infrastructure, with
Silicon Valley startups look to technologies coming out of Google, Facebook and so on. Then the cloud plug gaps in data value chain happened, with Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and so on, and it became trivial to store everything. So, that second wave of BI tools was evolving while
Alternative databases set for there was a complete revolution underneath it, and the tools did not catch up,” mainstream adoption? says Bien.
“And so there is a third wave, where there is a reconstitution of a complete How modern business platform, but working in this new data world,” he adds. Which is where, in Bien’s intelligence shapes up to big view, Looker comes in. data
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Michael Saylor, CEO and founder of one of the most established business In this e-guide intelligence firms, Microstrategy, disagrees with this analysis. In an interview with Computer Weekly in 2017, he countered: “I think any startup needs a MapR collapse into HPE narrative. It is true that there are stages, and companies have to grow and harbinger of big data tech evolve or they get left behind. But a more useful metaphor is that of an trough of despair? expanding universe. The world is not shifting from relational to big data, it is expanding in different dimensions simultaneously. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce “You still see a lot of Oracle, SQL and Teradata. There are MDX language sources – OLAP cubes. And there are the Hadoop distributions. Those are Google buys Looker to three data platforms, and no one of them is going to make the others go away. deepen enterprise software You can go to the top 5,000 companies on earth and find they are using them arsenal all.
Silicon Valley startups look to “And it goes on. There are applications like Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and so plug gaps in data value chain on – people will want to query the data in those directly. And there are web sources. None of those will replace each other, either. It’s more likely that a
Alternative databases set for Coca-Cola will want to join data in Hadoop, Salesforce and Oracle,” he said. mainstream adoption? “Now you can build a small or mid-sized company solving a subset of the data problem. Every company has to decide where to make its investments. Some BI
How modern business company might come along and say, ‘We are the best for the Hortonworks intelligence shapes up to big distribution of Hadoop’, and that might fly for a while. But I have been in this data business for 27 years, and every three years there is a new data technology which is the rage.”
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Complexity, complexity, they’ve all got complexity In this e-guide So, what is the state of play now, in 2019? Mike Ferguson, one of the most
MapR collapse into HPE high-profile independent analysts in the field, takes the view that the data and harbinger of big data tech business intelligence problems large companies, especially, have today are less trough of despair? about BI tooling choices and more about data integration. Much more. The main problem companies – and other large organisations – face, he says, is Tableau sticking to data complexity. mission under Salesforce “Creating a data-driven organisation is more difficult than people think. I always go back to that Peter Drucker comment, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. It is Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software easier with SMEs [small to medium-sized enterprises], but if a larger arsenal organisation has no chief data officer (CDO), or similar, you get lack of organisational alignment,” he says.
Silicon Valley startups look to “Companies which are doing well are strongly led by their CEOs, and really plug gaps in data value chain clear about the priority to be given to data. The problem always seems to lie in the middle, with the cultural issues of people and processes,” adds Ferguson. Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? In technical architecture terms, he says the idea that companies should bring all their data to one Hadoop system, in a centralised data lake, may be feasible for How modern business mid-sized enterprises, but there is such a deluge of data now – machine data, intelligence shapes up to big internet of things (IoT) data, social network data, open government data, data data from commercial providers – it is difficult to integrate.
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“Everywhere you look, there are disconnected pools of data [in corporate In this e-guide organisations]. And you think, ‘Could you not just do this once, and then we could all re-use it?’. So the objective is not to prepare all data for all users, but MapR collapse into HPE to incrementally build up a set of ready-made datasets that people can pick up harbinger of big data tech and re-use. There are big organisations very interested in this. And so you trough of despair? would have a group of data stores dedicated to ingestion, a group dedicated to cleaning and preparing stuff, and a group holding trusted stuff,” says Ferguson. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce As for business intelligence software, he says it is being “swamped by data science”, pushed to one side by the now more fashionable topic. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software “I think the issue here is twofold. BI has been advancing in the form of artificial arsenal intelligence going into the tools themselves to improve productivity. Say, recommending you to click on the right visualisation for the problem you’re
Silicon Valley startups look to trying to solve. The other being simplified interaction with these tools, with plug gaps in data value chain natural language processing and chatbot interfaces. But the problem in general with BI is it’s being swamped by so much money going into data science tools,”
Alternative databases set for says Ferguson. mainstream adoption? “And there is a war going on with the cloud vendors trying to get people onto their machine learning-based services for analytics. So it is a very fractured How modern business world, with BI left to one side a bit. Also, skills are too thinly spread across too intelligence shapes up to big many data science technologies. It is chaotic. data
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“The integration of BI with deployed models from data science is a big area In this e-guide where people want to see integration – with predictions, alerts, forecasts and recommendations made easy to access. And BI vendors who focus on that kind MapR collapse into HPE of thing will help,” he says. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? ‘Fit to fly’ at Nationwide
How are corporate organisations rendering this complexity tractable, by way of Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce aligning and streamlining their data and analytics strategies?
Paul French, director of business intelligence, visualisation and reporting, data Google buys Looker to and analytics, at building society Nationwide, explained his company’s approach deepen enterprise software in a briefing with Computer Weekly at the Gartner Data & Analytics conference arsenal in London earlier this year.
Silicon Valley startups look to In part, Nationwide’s strategy was informed by the way airline pilots are plug gaps in data value chain prepared to be “fit to fly” – a process French’s own stepson has recently gone through. You don’t just climb into the cockpit of a jet and press “Go”. Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? French described how the building society has centralised its data team, under a mandate from CEO Joe Garner, appointed in July 2016. French reports to
How modern business CDO Lee Raybould. Garner is aiming, says French, to move the society from a intelligence shapes up to big hierarchical, top-down culture to a more “accountable freedom” environment. data “From a data perspective, that has been perfect, in terms of supporting that shift by changing our data culture,” he says. “If you want people to be able to make
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decisions throughout the organisation in a spirit of accountable freedom, then In this e-guide empowering them with the right data, and the right levels of confidence in literacy, is vital. Essentially, we are moving from being data constrained to being MapR collapse into HPE data enabled.” harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? As part of that, Nationwide centralised its data governance, business intelligence, data warehousing and data lakes, and data science staff into one Tableau sticking to data team – presently of 180 people, but recruiting to expand to around 300 in the mission under Salesforce near future – reporting to the CDO function inaugurated by the society’s CEO.
That central data function found that 50% of the workers at Nationwide were Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software spending the majority of their time on data preparation work. arsenal “Our biggest challenge was we had Excel everywhere, Access everywhere, and SAS being used for the wrong things. SAS is a really great product when used Silicon Valley startups look to for the right thing, but it was being used for a lot of the wrong things – and plug gaps in data value chain understandably, because the business teams that were building stuff in SAS were not getting a central service from the data or IT teams. So they found a Alternative databases set for way, with tools that were available to them. But we are in a place now where we mainstream adoption? need to have stronger governance and control, while enabling self-service,” says French. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big “Essentially, we have a central data science team that both develops advanced data analytics models to support the business, but also helps grow capability and best practice in teams across the society. We operate a hub and spoke model
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that means we benefit from a central team driving best practice, standards, In this e-guide capability development, technology advancement and focusing on the big, business-wide opportunities, coupled with spoke teams in areas such as MapR collapse into HPE marketing and risk which have domain expertise in their business areas.” harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? He gives an example of how SAS specifically is now being used. SAS Visual Text Analytics allows the firm to experiment with natural language processing. Tableau sticking to data This is helping to determine if it could better understand the root cause of mission under Salesforce customer contact through browser-based messages from within its internet bank channel, to service members better. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software “We’ve a range of these types of opportunities, where we are exploring where arsenal richer amounts of data, advances in data science and analytics technologies, and a strong investment in our people – all part of our D&A [data and analytics]
Silicon Valley startups look to strategy – are enabling us to continue to improve the service offering to our plug gaps in data value chain members,” says French.
From a technology architecture perspective, the Nationwide data stack includes Alternative databases set for a Teradata data warehouse appliance with a Hortonworks Hadoop data lake mainstream adoption? connected to it. Before it decided on that warehouse and lake setup, it had Microsoft SQL Server instances spread through the organisation, he says. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big On the BI side, Nationwide has taken a multi-supplier approach. “I’m of the view data that there is no single BI tool that takes care of all our use cases. We have SAP Business Objects for very structured, static reporting, and have had for 10
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years. We use QlikView for our dashboarding and guided data discovery, and In this e-guide have signed a licence for [the more advanced] QlikSense for up to 5,000 users,” says French. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech Qlik was originally a departmental solution for the commercial team around 10 trough of despair? years ago, and it has accelerated Qlik use in line with the more recent wave of data and analytics strategy in the past three years. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Nationwide also uses ThoughtSpot – a search-based BI tool requiring little training – in the hands of its front-line employees. “My view is 75% to 80% of people in any business need simple information in a simple, intuitive way. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software ThoughtSpot provides a natural language-based interface that you can get arsenal someone, in a branch or contact centre, up and running with in half an hour’s training,” he says.
Silicon Valley startups look to But the BI tooling is, he adds, a small piece of the puzzle compared with plug gaps in data value chain changing the data culture, which it has been doing with events like data speed dating – where staff from outside the data team can have time with data Alternative databases set for practitioners – and, most recently, its first hackathon. This, he says, was mainstream adoption? sponsored by someone who leads the contact centre change team and was organised around a simple question: What is the impact when a member How modern business contacts us via the phone? intelligence shapes up to big data Some 270 people got involved in the four-week (dispersed in time and space) hackathon, working with Cisco call data, ranging in personnel from data science
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modelling teams to an area manager. “It’s really engaged people, and has In this e-guide started providing insight on a business area we are interested in,” he says. And using, it seems, precisely the “messy” kind of data that lies beyond the numbers MapR collapse into HPE sitting in the neat rows and columns of a relational database – in this case, harbinger of big data tech audio. trough of despair? Schroders liberating business users to solve own problems Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Asset management firm Schroders, set up in 1804, is another financial services firm that has been modernising its data and analytics strategy. Whereas Nationwide is a Qlik customer, Schroders is an aficionado of its close rival, Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Tableau. arsenal Mike Renwick, head of data and insights technology at Schroders, gives this account of the problem the firm was trying to solve when, four years ago, it went Silicon Valley startups look to looking for something like the Seattle-based data visualisation software plug gaps in data value chain supplier’s wares.
Alternative databases set for “Tableau, for us, was always about increasing the surface area of people who mainstream adoption? were able to solve their own problems in the line of business, with guidance and support,” he tells Computer Weekly. “In the past, technology teams tended to How modern business hold the monopoly for building reporting, and the tight interaction required made intelligence shapes up to big it difficult for business users to get to the point where they were genuinely data asking and answering questions of data.
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“There is an interpretation layer between requirements gathering and In this e-guide implementation that meant the people who best understood the data were having to ask others who understood the technology better to do it for them. MapR collapse into HPE Tableau shortens that distance and means a finance team can directly harbinger of big data tech interrogate the data themselves with their own data expertise, to find answers to trough of despair? questions in the moment.”
Tableau sticking to data Does he think older BI tools that classically matched up with data warehousing mission under Salesforce are not such a good fit for big, unstructured or less structured data?
“I think they sometimes can be a good fit, although there is definitely a gap in Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software user-friendly processing of unstructured data for consumption in a BI tool. arsenal Unstructured data needs some sort of structuring to be usefully processed – if you have your email inbox as a data source, you would need to turn it into some
Silicon Valley startups look to sort of structured shape to make use of the data,” says Renwick. plug gaps in data value chain “Tableau is quite interesting, due to its web data connector idea – something quite simple that allows you to write an adaptor from some unstructured source, Alternative databases set for for example, into structured Tableau data,” he adds. mainstream adoption? “Kalpana Chari, capability lead of the Knowledge Analytics team at Schroders, How modern business and her team used this to build a connector to ElasticSearch, that allowed our intelligence shapes up to big users to look for specific terms appearing in meeting notes, and then see how data they trend on a graph – think Google Trends for internal meeting notes. The
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result is visualised in Tableau, and these entry points into the ecosystem meant In this e-guide it could be extended for this kind of use-case,” says Renwick.
MapR collapse into HPE Describing how the overall data and analytics programme is organised at harbinger of big data tech Schroders and how it has set up its data engineers and scientists to work trough of despair? together, he says the data science team – the Data Insights Unit – tends to be interested in different types of technology to those used in core systems in the Tableau sticking to data business. mission under Salesforce “Due to their unique requirements, they help to shift existing thinking around data technology towards more scalable and open models,” says Renwick. “In Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software businesses like ours, which sell to other businesses rather than consumers, it’s arsenal not common to encounter datasets with billions of rows of data. However, our data scientists are often dealing with datasets approaching 100 billion rows.
Silicon Valley startups look to This means traditional data analysis techniques can’t be used and the skills of a plug gaps in data value chain computer programmer and statistician are needed, as well as access to the big data or cloud technologies to handle data of this volume.
Alternative databases set for “Our engineers and scientists work closely together, using their different and mainstream adoption? complementary skills in partnership. Our engineers do a brilliant job of building robust tools and thinking about the whole system. This leads to our data How modern business scientists being able to spend more time answering difficult questions, exploring intelligence shapes up to big unique data and applying scientific rigour to business decisions for the entire data firm,” he says.
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“We see a central core of experts as a useful starting point, but have made a In this e-guide point of both connecting to internal initiatives that in a progressive organisation can, and should, be quite emergent and seeding teams with embedded data MapR collapse into HPE professionals – think of them like field operatives who get deeply engrossed in harbinger of big data tech specific business lines, but benefit from the broader community of data science trough of despair? and engineering professionals in other areas. Creating some movement here is valuable – jobs in-situ can become repetitive after several years, so having a Tableau sticking to data joined-up ecosystem of this community allows for people to rotate or specialise, mission under Salesforce or indeed, generalise.
Google buys Looker to On the top-level business benefits of its use of Tableau, visible at board level, deepen enterprise software Renwick says it has proved that it has delivered an eight times return on the arsenal costs.
Silicon Valley startups look to “One story involved our investment operations support team that use Tableau plug gaps in data value chain dashboards they built to check data quality ahead of trading. It is a mundane- sounding use-case, but has a materially positive impact, lowering errors and
Alternative databases set for omissions and with bottom-line impact,” he says. mainstream adoption? A BI strategy is more than a list of tools
How modern business While Nationwide, Schroders and King (see box below) all boast clear data and intelligence shapes up to big analytics strategies, Andy Bitterer, now an “evangelist” at SAP, but a long-time data data and BI-focused analyst, including at Gartner, thinks this is all too uncommon.
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Speaking at the co-located Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence & In this e-guide Analytics conferences in November 2018, he said: “In my previous role at Gartner, we used to run an annual survey among 3,000 or so CIOs worldwide. MapR collapse into HPE We would ask them what their major objectives were for the next 12 months, harbinger of big data tech and business analytics was always near the top or top. You would think that if trough of despair? that was the case, you would have a strategy around that. But if you ask them about their BI strategy, they usually talk about reporting, which won’t get you to Tableau sticking to data digital transformation. mission under Salesforce “A BI strategy is not just a list of the tools that we want to have. Many times I Google buys Looker to have asked users, ‘What’s your BI strategy?’, and they have replied with the deepen enterprise software name of a vendor. That’s not a strategy. That’s like Ferrari saying, ‘Our Formula arsenal 1 racing strategy is we’re going to use red paint, Bridgestone tyres and Esso fuel, and drive really fast in a circle’.” Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain To look at a King
Ian Thompson, principal engineer for business intelligence (BI) at Candy Crush Alternative databases set for maker King, talks about his company’s use of Looker. mainstream adoption? What were the business and technical problems you were looking to solve How modern business when you went looking for something like Looker? intelligence shapes up to big data After roughly five years reporting through the same tool and a rapid expansion due to the success of Candy Crush Saga, our staffing and data needs were
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faced with two major obstacles in the way users interacted with our main BI tool. In this e-guide The first was that our current set of reports/dashboards were grinding to a halt. The reports created by a centralised BI team were trying to cater to the masses MapR collapse into HPE and tick as many boxes as possible for as many users as possible. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? This resulted in everyone paying the price for the volume of data required in these reports. Soon, several versions of the same reports were being released, Tableau sticking to data but segmented in as many ways as possible, still allowing a range of different mission under Salesforce users to answer the questions they were asking of the data but with a reasonable user experience, which is obviously not ideal for several reasons. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software The other huge issue we saw was that people were not interacting with the data arsenal in our BI tool – they would mostly export huge volumes of data and move to their preferred tool of choice to work, either unaware or unable to complete that
Silicon Valley startups look to task in a cleaner, more reusable and robust way inside the tool itself. plug gaps in data value chain The term “self-service BI” became very popular, and after working even more closely with our stakeholders to make this term become reality, we finally Alternative databases set for realised the barrier to entry for the majority of our users was too high and, more mainstream adoption? importantly, the desire to learn how to use this tool was either lost or didn’t exist.
How modern business The combination of these factors meant that we would have to produce more intelligence shapes up to big specific data models and reports for our stakeholders. With many of these data stakeholders unable to help build and create these in our BI tool, the centralised team would be too stretched and we became aware of our need to devolve part
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or all of the process of producing data exploration or reporting to those In this e-guide stakeholders who know best what they require.
MapR collapse into HPE Do you think the older BI tools that classically matched up with data harbinger of big data tech warehousing are not a good fit for big, unstructured/less structured data? trough of despair? Looker CEO Frank Bien gives a very interesting presentation of the first, second and third waves of BI, and you can see many of the audience nodding along as Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce this is all too familiar to them.
Without wishing to describe “big data”, it very quickly becomes more important Google buys Looker to to collect data for everything in the chance it has some use. Generally speaking, deepen enterprise software teams and skills adapted faster than the tooling and users with this new vast arsenal amount of information seamlessly at their hands soon found fault with what had been so reliable and performant for such a long time. Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain Many of the older BI tools coupled with warehousing are still very good at handling data cubes and reporting, but like we and many others have found, Alternative databases set for when you wish to delve deeper into the stray, unloved and unclean data, the mainstream adoption? overhead and constraints you can face make you realise you might have to step away from what has been known and functional for many years. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big Why did you choose Looker? data A small team ran a comparison between five data exploration tools. The focus was on “data exploration”, but also trying to move away from in -memory tools
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due to our data volumes and, arguably most importantly, something that our In this e-guide stakeholders would pick up quickly and get their hands dirty with.
MapR collapse into HPE Looker coupled with our MPP [massively parallel processing] database worked harbinger of big data tech very well and surprised many of the data team that analysis could be run in real trough of despair? time. Many of us knew this would be the start of the end for producing highly spec’d data cubes for each use case and having to manage the processing and Tableau sticking to data scheduling of this data each and every morning. This was enough for us to take mission under Salesforce the winner of the evaluation – Looker – to a trial with a stakeholder team.
Looking back at the evaluation scorecard now, I can see that it scored lower Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software than the majority in the “Usability” category, specifically around the development arsenal side. I find this very amusing because we had obviously under-estimated how and what our users would be capable of doing with Looker and hugely
Silicon Valley startups look to underestimated their desire to move to a new tool and realise “self-service BI”. plug gaps in data value chain When did you first start using it?
Alternative databases set for In mid-2016, while searching around for a stakeholder team to trial Looker on, mainstream adoption? we came across a team which had grown so disillusioned with our current setup that it was in talks with another vendor to create its own BI stack. Many of the How modern business team had previous experience with this tool, and while they may still have had intelligence shapes up to big the data volumes issue, they understood and were prepared to create reports data and dashboards using this tool.
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We bought ourselves two weeks and spent a couple of days building a small In this e-guide proof of concept for the team. By the end of the trial, we were staggered by the amount and quality of content they had created, as well as model changes MapR collapse into HPE made by a few power users who had emerged. After the trial, the team was fully harbinger of big data tech brought in and didn’t wish to go back, and we moved around the business trough of despair? capturing teams one at a time with similar success. Last month, we switched off our legacy BI tool, which has contained only financial reporting for the past year. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Describe your data science and data engineering teams: how big, what their cultures are like Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software I am lucky to be working in a very data-savvy company. I have spent my time arsenal making a real impact with data rather than persuading users of its benefits. Our core data engineering team, which maintains the platforms, data ingestion, ETL
Silicon Valley startups look to [extract, transform, load] and BI, is roughly 25 people. There are between two plug gaps in data value chain and 10 data analysts/scientists in each stakeholder team (finance, marketing, game teams, human resources, etc). Different technologies and methods are
Alternative databases set for rarely restricted and roles and remits are very fluid. There are also a handful of mainstream adoption? other engineering teams which either heavily rely on data or also chip in to create data-based products.
How modern business What’s the organisational design of your analytics setup? Centralised, intelligence shapes up to big decentralised, or a bit of both? data
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A bit of both. The data platform and data ingestion team centralise this function In this e-guide to give the company a good data foundation. From there, it becomes slowly more decentralised. Our core ETL team cover most bases with the data MapR collapse into HPE products they produce but we have many data analysts/scientists or even other harbinger of big data tech teams creating data models. The BI platform is also centralised, however data trough of despair? models and content inside is all created, owned and maintained by stakeholders, with the assistance of the core data teams. There are exceptions Tableau sticking to data to this, of course, which is how we experiment and innovate. mission under Salesforce Is data integration more important than BI tooling when it comes to your Google buys Looker to data and analytics strategy? deepen enterprise software arsenal I would say yes. With the data teams and capability we have in King, this is not as a hard decision as it might be in a smaller company where it might be an
Silicon Valley startups look to either/or situation. We often make use of disparate datasets elsewhere other plug gaps in data value chain than our BI tool and we try to employ best engineering practices of bringing all our data into a single warehouse.
Alternative databases set for What have been the top-level business benefits of your use of Looker? mainstream adoption? A lot of people have saved a lot of time that they have been able to invest How modern business elsewhere, mostly exploring data. We have put the power into our users’ hands, intelligence shapes up to big who know best what they need. We have been able to share our analytics data internally and externally with our partners in a more secure and efficient way.
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In this e-guide Southern Water’s centralised data team MapR collapse into HPE geared for silo busting harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
Southern Water is transforming its approach to data management in order to Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce improve decision-making, and this has involved pooling its data workers into a centralised team.
Google buys Looker to Amy Balmain, head of data exploitation at the water company, joined the deepen enterprise software organisation from the Pensions Regulator in late 2017, and has also worked in arsenal IT at John Lewis. She arrived at Southern Water with a mandate from the then chief data officer, Peter Jackson, to bring the organisation’s data specialists into Silicon Valley startups look to one team in order to get efficiencies of scale. plug gaps in data value chain Previously, Southern Water had what Balmain described as “pockets of people Alternative databases set for doing data and analytics work, but within individual departments”. And they had mainstream adoption? a deal of “technical debt”, partly in the form of essential business processes and reporting processes being in spreadsheets and Access databases, generating How modern business data whose quality was hard to assure. This problem, if ignored, would have intelligence shapes up to big stored up costs and difficulties for the future. data
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But it is not just a question of better tooling, says Balmain, important though that In this e-guide is. Southern’s team have found joy in the use of cloud business intelligence (BI) technology from Birst and extract, transform and load (ETL) tooling from MapR collapse into HPE Wherescape. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? The former has provided geo-spatial business intelligence “out of the box”, and delivered £250,000 in cost savings identified on day one. The latter has Tableau sticking to data delivered speed and ease of use that has impressed the team. “We reckon it’s mission under Salesforce about 20 times faster than older environments of building code, in the likes of Ab Initio or Informatica,” says Balmain. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software The company has also turned to Microsoft Azure for the cloud storage of data arsenal science activities.
But the main drive has been to get a better-skilled workforce with a greater Silicon Valley startups look to understanding of data in the team, and to improve data literacy more widely in plug gaps in data value chain the organisation.
Alternative databases set for Why this emphasis? To gain a better understanding of how the organisation’s mainstream adoption? people and assets are performing, says Balmain. An example would be assessing pump efficiency, when many pumps are named differently. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big Balmain presented on the work she has led at the IRM UK Enterprise Data, data Business Intelligence & Analytics conference in London late last year.
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She described how Southern Water manages the supply of water and waste In this e-guide management to 4.5 million people in a geograph ic area that covers Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, West Sussex, East Sussex and Kent. Its assets include 83 MapR collapse into HPE water treatment works, almost 14,000km of water mains, 2,375 pumping harbinger of big data tech stations and 39, 6000km of sewers. trough of despair? The company’s data is varied and complex, some of it about assets that are 200 Tableau sticking to data years old. It has 80,000 telemetry points returning data every 15 minutes. And mission under Salesforce its thousands of call centre staff deal with thousands of customer calls, generating audio data that can be analysed to improve customer service. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Balmain, who reports into the IT function at Southern Water, manages a data arsenal team of about 25 people that works both on its own and with IT to improve decision-making throughout the organisation, which employs nearly 3,000
Silicon Valley startups look to people and has about 1,500 contractors in its ambit. plug gaps in data value chain Moving water
Alternative databases set for Speaking of the water industry more generally, Balmain makes the point that mainstream adoption? 20% of energy in Europe is “used to move water around”. She adds: “If you cut that down to 19% or even 19.5%, you could probably shut down a few coal- How modern business powered energy plants.” intelligence shapes up to big data And reflecting on the relationship between IT and the business, in the business world more broadly, outside of the specific context of Southern Water, and
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where data is concerned, Balmain says this is shifting, and will continue to so In this e-guide do.
MapR collapse into HPE “I’d say IT, as a function, has historically dictated to the business what it thinks harbinger of big data tech the business needs in terms of IT, and that has been fine because for a long trough of despair? time, IT were the only people who understood how business systems worked,” she says. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce “But if you move to a cloud environment and you’ve got an HR director who comes in who has done several HR implementations and knows who the systems integrators are who are good at this, and knows what the business Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software requirements are, then what becomes the role of IT? Is it just providing end-user arsenal equipment, or is it as providing and maintaining a governance structure?
“And how does data management contribute to that? We’re going to be looking Silicon Valley startups look to at massive amounts of change in terms of where the various responsibilities lie. plug gaps in data value chain That means a bit more upskilling of people who will be able to make decisions – whether it’s financial systems investment decisions or data quality and Alternative databases set for governance matters. mainstream adoption? “For me, one of the advantages of centralising my data team is that we’ve How modern business already got proven managers who are able to deliver for the business. It’s intelligence shapes up to big building that business relationship [with them] – that’s the key thing. If you are data seen as other or outside, then people are not going to want to use you – they will to use their own services.”
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Balmain says her data team at Southern Water has a couple of “pure data In this e-guide scientists” and a “layer of people who are very good at doin g deep insight, understanding the principles of statistical modelling, and who understand the MapR collapse into HPE restrictions in the data and are able to move quite quickly to deliver harbinger of big data tech unrepeatable pieces of deep analysis”. R is used extensively in the team. she trough of despair? adds. However, Balmain is sceptical about data visualisation tools such as Tableau. Tableau sticking to data “There are only so many visualisations that make sense to people before you mission under Salesforce start really going into infographics,” she says. “Most people still want to see something either in a geo-spatial arrangement or in a set of standard Google buys Looker to visualisations that they can understand. I think the weirder and wackier that deepen enterprise software things start to get, the less people understand. arsenal “For me, Tableau is not an enterprise tool, and I’m interested in working for the Silicon Valley startups look to enterprise, not necessarily for a few people who can do something whizzy with plug gaps in data value chain Tableau and then not necessarily be able to move it into a production -ready state.” Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Balmain adds: “We can build all the stuff that we want, we can produce endless reports, but if the people receiving the information don’t know why they’re
How modern business getting it, or don’t understand the variability within the data or which bits matter intelligence shapes up to big and which bits don’t, then it’s pointless.”
data
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In this e-guide Universities use data analytics to tackle MapR collapse into HPE student mental health harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? SA Mathieson,
Four years ago, after a student at the University of Manchester’s School of Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Physics and Astronomy committed suicide, lecturer Andrew Markwick wondered if the institution could try to identify students that might be struggling.
Google buys Looker to The school holds a variety of data on its students, including attendance at deepen enterprise software meetings and lectures and submission of work, but it was in a disparate set of arsenal systems.
Silicon Valley startups look to So he built StudentCRT, which provides the personal tutors who guide plug gaps in data value chain individual students and welfare officers with a single view of this data and generates a score to spot those at risk. “It’s about identifying those students and Alternative databases set for having a conversation with them as soon as possible,” Markwick says. mainstream adoption? Those conversations can reveal an innocent reason such as a holiday, but “it
How modern business can unlock a whole world of struggle”, he adds, and some serious problems intelligence shapes up to big have been uncovered as a result of the system’s operation. data Since its introduction, the school has referred fewer students to the university’s counselling service while referrals from other schools have risen, indicating that
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the system is helping, although Markwick stresses that this has not been proved In this e-guide by research. It has also made it easier for staff to support students.
MapR collapse into HPE StudentCRT now covers data on some 2,000 students in the university’s harbinger of big data tech physics and mechanical engineering schools and other schools may follow, trough of despair? although Marwick adds that it might be easier to implement in science-based subjects with more structured teaching methods where participation can easily Tableau sticking to data be measured. He has founded a company, Third Floor Systems, to market the mission under Salesforce system to other universities.
Universities are certainly interested in providing better mental health support to Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software their students, with numbers reporting mental health conditions having risen by arsenal nearly six times between 2007-2008, and 2016-2017, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Universities UK, which represents the sector, says
Silicon Valley startups look to that at least 95 students killed themselves in 2016-2017. plug gaps in data value chain Most students appear open to having universities monitor their mental health, with 66% happy for their parents or guardians to be contacted in extreme Alternative databases set for circumstances if their university is concerned about their mental health, and a mainstream adoption? further 15% content for this to happen in any circumstances, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute’s annual survey of 14,000 students. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data
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Generating alerts from data In this e-guide Jo Midgley, pro vice-chancellor for student experience at University of the West
MapR collapse into HPE of England, says that today’s students face tough conditions, with most harbinger of big data tech undergraduates borrowing tens of thousands of pounds to pay fees and living trough of despair? expenses, and working while studying to support themselves. The costs lead to high expectations from students, compounded by the pressures of social media. Tableau sticking to data “Some of the anxiety we see is understandable,” she says. mission under Salesforce But the result is that the university has seen demand for its counselling services rising unsustainably. So it is in its first year of using a system provided by Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Solutionpath to improve student well-being. “We were really keen to get arsenal upstream,” adds Midgley.
Each week, the system analyses a range of data on all foundation and first-year Silicon Valley startups look to students (future year groups will be added as they matriculate). It looks for plug gaps in data value chain students whose engagement appears to be lessening, then emails or telephones them to discuss, typically contacting around 10% to 15% of students Alternative databases set for as a result. mainstream adoption? Midgley says that the system has revealed increased anxiety from late January How modern business to early March due to particular academic demands at this time. In the future, intelligence shapes up to big the university may provide more advice before Christmas to pre-empt such data problems, and expects to learn more about how it can change its processes to lessen stress.
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But it also hopes to help many anxious students realise they are not mentally ill In this e-guide and do need counselling. “If we can deal with problems much earlier and smaller problems far more effectively, then we can ensure that our resources MapR collapse into HPE are used in the best way and that we can far more effectively support those harbinger of big data tech students who genuinely need that higher level of support,” she says. trough of despair? Nottingham Trent University is adapting an existing system that it uses to Tableau sticking to data monitor engagement. It was Solutionpath’s first customer in 2012, but has mission under Salesforce recently started using an alert feature triggered if a student has had no engagement with the university for 14 days. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software If we can deal with problems much earlier...we can far more effectively support those arsenal students who genuinely need that higher level of support Jo Midgley, University of the West of England Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain Using this rather than a formula means staff and students understand it, although the university is looking at varying the period so newer students are Alternative databases set for contacted earlier. mainstream adoption? As well as monitoring attendance and work submission, the system includes use of the university’s virtual learning environment (VLE), through which How modern business intelligence shapes up to big students access course materials. data
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“What we are finding is that students with mental health conditions are far more In this e-guide likely to generate an alert than their peers,” says Ed Foster, the university’s student engagement manager. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech The alerts, which in its first year have been triggered for 3% to 4% of students, trough of despair? are sent to personal tutors, who can then contact the student. They also have access to a detailed dashboard on students’ engagement. “It helps them to Tableau sticking to data prepare for that first discussion with a student, giving them some pointers,” says mission under Salesforce Foster.
Nottingham Trent also provides students with access to their own dashboard, Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software allowing them to see how they compare to averages for their peer group. Foster arsenal says that some students have found themselves motivated by the realisation they were falling behind.
Silicon Valley startups look to But some students at University of Leeds oppose such dashboards, according plug gaps in data value chain to Professor Neil Morris, dean of digital education. He is working on a code of practice for learning analytics developed with students, in advance of the Alternative databases set for university introducing a system of this kind. mainstream adoption? “We have students who have said, ‘I will not look at this dashboard, I will not log How modern business in, because I don’t want to know how I’m doing against to everyone else’,” he intelligence shapes up to big says. data
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Some express worries that such systems will not consider students as In this e-guide individuals.
MapR collapse into HPE “Students ask, ‘What are you going to do in terms of making decisions about me harbinger of big data tech as a person, when I’m an individual not a data point?’. That’s been quite trough of despair? challenging,” Morris says.
These concerns have been reflected in the code. “We’ve been very clear that Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce we only want the data to inform a conversation, so it’s the starting point for a conversation between student and tutor,” says Morris.
Google buys Looker to The university will focus on using data to help individual students to overcome deepen enterprise software barriers and to improve how it delivers its teaching, with Morris saying: “We’re arsenal looking at it from a student success perspective.”
Silicon Valley startups look to He adds that students studying remotely could particularly benefit, as most or all plug gaps in data value chain of their engagement takes place digitally – making it easy to measure and assess accurately – and they often study while working, meaning they are more Alternative databases set for likely to welcome advice. mainstream adoption? Predicting mental health concerns
How modern business There is also work to develop systems that can be used across higher intelligence shapes up to big data education, with Northumbria University leading a £2m project largely funded by the government’s Office for Students to use a range of data to predict which students are at risk of mental health crisis.
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Working with other universities, students’ unions, charities and suppliers In this e-guide including Microsoft, the project aims to provide tools and techniques by 2021.
MapR collapse into HPE James Murray, whose son Ben committed suicide in 2018 when he was a harbinger of big data tech student at Bristol University, is working with Universities UK on the project. trough of despair? Murray has worked in data analytics and believes universities should consider a wide range of information in identifying at-risk students, including their Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce behaviour.
“Serious concern is when someone is displaying a pattern of behaviour that is Google buys Looker to out of the ordinary for them, and that could potentially be leading towards a deepen enterprise software crisis state,” he says. arsenal Murray says it is crucial that institutions do a better job of joining up what they Silicon Valley startups look to already hold. His son’s inquest showed that information about his illnesses and plug gaps in data value chain anxiety was discussed in emails, but was not recorded on the spreadsheet used in the meeting which decided to dismiss him, partly due to data protection Alternative databases set for concerns. Ben killed himself soon after receiving a letter passing on this mainstream adoption? decision.
How modern business “The one time where that it could have been vital, potentially in saving a life, intelligence shapes up to big was at that dismissal meeting,” James Murray says. “There are critical moments data during the processes that people are following where the injection of information
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could make a difference, could be life and death. It was life and death in Ben’s In this e-guide case.”
MapR collapse into HPE University of Bristol, which has since changed a range of processes including harbinger of big data tech how it handles student dismissals, is one of those involved in the Northumbria trough of despair? project.
Mental health at work Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce Murray sees potential for similar systems in the workplace, such as processes that may lead to suspension or firing. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software “Technology should enable this to happen more safely by bringing the right arsenal information to the right person at the right time, to make the right decision,” he says. As well as helping to protect employees, organisations may protect Silicon Valley startups look to themselves from legal and reputational damage. plug gaps in data value chain Some suppliers are looking at what they could offer employers to su pport staff
Alternative databases set for mental health, although not yet in ways that could identify individuals at risk. mainstream adoption? People First, a service which asks employees questions on engagement with work, provides consolidated data for employers, but only for groups rather than
How modern business individuals. intelligence shapes up to big data Mark Williams, chief product officer at People First, says that individuals would not provide honest feedback if they could be identified.
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Wellbeing app provider Remente, which provides training and advice, similarly In this e-guide carries out regular surveys of employees for its corporate subscribers and again provides only consolidated results to employers. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech Chief executive David Brudö says that the system works better when it is not trough of despair? mandatory. “There needs to be a pull rather than a push. This should be a resource that is offered from the employer,” he says. Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce There might be potential to go further, particularly with specific groups and types of employee. Brudö says that young employees particularly value work-life balance, while People First’s Williams reckons that remote workers could Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software particularly benefit from such services given they are at risk of isolation. arsenal University of Manchester’s Andrew Markwick says that he has discussed StudentCRT with police authorities, armed forces and those managing Silicon Valley startups look to sportspeople. plug gaps in data value chain “The thing that unites our students and these groups is that these people are Alternative databases set for pretty talented, but they are under pressure and in some cases they struggle in mainstream adoption? silence,” he says. Some may find it hard to admit they have problems, which makes identifying them all the more important. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big Although systems designed to spot for mental health problems may start with data data analysis, Markwick adds that this should be followed with human contact, something echoed by other universities.
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“A lot of cases are dealt with simply by having a conversation,” he says. “The In this e-guide fact that a student knows someone is looking out for them – not to tell them off, but because they care about them – I think that matters.” MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech trough of despair?
Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce
Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software arsenal
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In this e-guide How supercomputing is transforming MapR collapse into HPE experimental science harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
Debbie Bard will be making, in a sense, a homecoming speech at the DataTech Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce conference in Edinburgh on 14 March 2019.
Bard leads the Data Science Engagement Group at the National Energy Google buys Looker to Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley National Lab in the deepen enterprise software US. She is an alumna of the University of Edinburgh, where she did a PhD in arsenal physics.
Silicon Valley startups look to DataTech is part of the two-week DataFest 19, organised by The Data Lab, a plug gaps in data value chain data innovation-focused agency supported by the Scottish government. DataTech is being held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Bard’s talk is entitled, “Supercomputing and the scientist: how HPC and large- scaled data analytics are transforming experimental science”.
How modern business She argues that although computing has been an important scientific tool for intelligence shapes up to big data many decades, the “increasing volume and complexity of scientific datasets is transforming the way we think about the use of computing for experimental science”.
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NERSC is the computing centre for the US Department of Energy Office of In this e-guide Science. It runs some of the most powerful computers on the planet. Bard talks about how supercomputing at NERSC is used in experimental science to MapR collapse into HPE change how scientists in particle physics, cosmology, materials science and harbinger of big data tech structural biology collect and analyse data. trough of despair? Bard’s team supports more than 7,000 scientists and 700 projects with Tableau sticking to data supercomputing needs at NERSC. She is a British citizen whose career spans mission under Salesforce research in particle physics, cosmology and computing on both sides of the pond. She worked at Imperial College London and SLAC National Accelerator Google buys Looker to Laboratory in the US before joining the data department at NERSC. deepen enterprise software arsenal Making new experiments possible
Ahead of her talk at DataFest, she took some time out to talk to Computer Silicon Valley startups look to Weekly. plug gaps in data value chain “The transformational part is about how computing is enabling new kinds of Alternative databases set for hardware to function to make new experiments possible,” she says. mainstream adoption? “If you have a very high-resolution detector, you need to be able to analyse the
How modern business data coming off that detector, and for that you need HPC [high-performance intelligence shapes up to big computing] and large-scale data analytics. That all opens up new opportunities, data which then open up new kinds of questions.
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“That’s what I get really excited about – when you can use computing to open In this e-guide up new kinds of science that were impossible before, that could not even be thought about. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech “For example, in electron microscopy, new types of detectors are producing trough of despair? insane amounts of data, through four-dimensional scanning – that is to say, also in time. That is where supercomputing comes in, to help design analysis Tableau sticking to data algorithms. mission under Salesforce “Another is ‘messy’ genomic analysis, where a geneticist has a sample of a microbiome – for example, a soil sample – containing thousands of different Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software organisms of bacteria. Trying to do sequential DNA analysis of all those bacteria arsenal is insanely complex. It’s a huge, data-intensive problem. And it is important because if you know which soil is productive, you can grow crops more
Silicon Valley startups look to effectively without pesticides,” she says. plug gaps in data value chain Motivated by the mission
Alternative databases set for Bard’s team of half a dozen data scientists at NERSC help the organisation’s mainstream adoption? scientists write code that will run well on their computing resources.
How modern business They have all, including Bard, “spent time working in areas that are intelligence shapes up to big computationally demanding”, but none are computer scientists. Instead, they data come from such fields as bio-informatics, physical chemistry and material science. She is a cosmologist by background.
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Bard says it is “challenging to hire people” in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this e-guide There are other labs, such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the research universities, such as Stanford, the University of California, and San MapR collapse into HPE Francisco. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? There are also the Silicon Valley companies – such as Google, Facebook and Apple – and the rest that can offer much bigger salaries. But people doing Tableau sticking to data scientific computing are “motivated by the mission, working on scientific mission under Salesforce challenges using massive computers,” says Bard.
Google buys Looker to The data itself is also different in kind to that analysed by commercial deepen enterprise software organisations. “Reproducibility is important for scientific data – being able to arsenal trace the provenance of the data, what’s been done to it,” says Bard. “And all the metadata around an experiment, such as what time it was done and what Silicon Valley startups look to the conditions were. That is a big problem. plug gaps in data value chain “You can’t afford to lose any data, you can’t drop any packets when transferring
Alternative databases set for between sites. Every byte is important. You have to think hard about your mainstream adoption? compression methodologies.
“We don’t have access to any of the easy data compression schemes that might How modern business be accessible in the commercial sector, so we need specialist networking to intelligence shapes up to big transfer scientific data,” she adds. data
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There is also the matter of “black box” machine learning algorithms, where a In this e-guide scientist would “really need to know why decisions are being made by algorithms”. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech “It can be difficult to have interpretable machine learning algorithms, and that is trough of despair? an area where the research community is having to step up,” says Bard. “If you can’t understand why an algorithm is working, it is difficult for a scientist to Tableau sticking to data accept the results. So, that is a barrier to machine learning being accepted by mission under Salesforce the scientific community.
“In a commercial application, you don’t really care why your algorithm is saying, Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software ‘That’s a picture of a cat’ or ‘That’s a picture of a dog’, as long as it is doing it arsenal accurately. In a scientific application, you do care about accuracy, but also about why it is working, so you can trust it isn’t hiding an internal bias.”
Silicon Valley startups look to
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In this e-guide Data firms join forces to help Path beat MapR collapse into HPE malaria harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor
A group of data management and analytics suppliers have joined forces to help Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce speed up the war against malaria.
Tableau, Mapbox, Exasol and Alteryx have committed $4.3m over the next Google buys Looker to three years to back the expansion of an anti-malaria scheme in sub-Saharan deepen enterprise software Africa, run by health charity Path. arsenal In an interview with Computer Weekly in 2017 that covered the involvement of Silicon Valley startups look to Alteryx in Path’s data analysis activities, Duncan Earle, director of country plug gaps in data value chain programmes for the Malaria Control and Elimination Partnership in Africa (Macepa) at Path said: “Accounting for population growth, if we hadn’t done Alternative databases set for anything from 2004 onwards, the number of deaths from malaria would be 1.6 mainstream adoption? million a year, not 450,000. And those lives are saved every year.”
How modern business This latest grant to Path is aimed at building on the five-year-old Visualize No intelligence shapes up to big Malaria initiative and was announced at a World Malaria Day 2019 event hosted data by the RBM Partnership to End Malaria in alliance with the City of Paris and the French government at the Hotel de Ville in Paris.
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Path hopes to use the money to support “national governments and regional In this e-guide organisations in up to six sub-Saharan countries in the use of real-time data and analytics to bolster decision-making around elimination efforts”, according to a MapR collapse into HPE press statement from the organisation. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Steve Davis, president and CEO of Path, said: “Successful malaria elimination programmes require accurate data that moves faster than the disease itself – to Tableau sticking to data help shorten the distance and time it takes to find and treat cases, and even to mission under Salesforce predict risk and direct resources before cases occur.”
The investment will also fund training for hundreds of front-line health workers Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software and officials on how to use data to tackle malaria and other diseases. arsenal The Visualize No Malaria programme was launched in 2015 as a collaboration between the Tableau Foundation and Zambia’s ministry of health and national Silicon Valley startups look to malaria elimination centre in efforts to eliminate the disease by 2021. plug gaps in data value chain According to the press statement, the Zambian government has reduced Alternative databases set for reported malaria cases by 85% and malaria-related deaths by 92% across a mainstream adoption? population of 1.8 million people in the country’s southern province.
How modern business The programme’s tools and approach are reportedly being replicated in intelligence shapes up to big Senegal, which has seen a 60% drop in reported malaria cases across a data northern Senegal population of 1.8 million in two years.
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Doudou Séne, director of Senegal’s national malaria control programme, said: In this e-guide “The national malaria control programme sees new tools to make data faster and easier to use and act upon as critical to helping us win the fight against MapR collapse into HPE malaria. With this new commitment, we can increase the number of districts harbinger of big data tech where we use the Visualize No Malaria stack and make informed, real-time trough of despair? decisions across the nation, as well as support our cross-border collaboration with the Gambia.” Tableau sticking to data For the Tableau Foundation, this is the second major grant and the first in the mission under Salesforce global health arena following a $100m pledge announced by Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky at the 2018 Tableau Conference. Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Neal Myrick, global head of the foundation, said: “Since the outset of the arsenal Visualize No Malaria initiative, we have seen countries and communities develop incredibly effective resources for fighting the disease.” Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain Data analytics firm Alteryx is again contributing, as part of its Alteryx for Good programme, as is in-memory database provider Exasol.
Alternative databases set for Mapbox is another supplier taking part in the effort, and is said to be providing mainstream adoption? remote and on-site technical support and training, as well as testing new offline mapping tools. How modern business intelligence shapes up to big Mapbox CEO Eric Gundersen said: “Our company’s roots began with global data development projects in Afghanistan, Congo, Haiti, and the US, so the mission of Visualize No Malaria is very close to our hearts.”
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In this e-guide Getting more CW+ exclusive content MapR collapse into HPE As a CW+ member, you have access to TechTarget’s entire portfolio of 140+ harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? websites. CW+ access directs you to previously unavailable “platinum members- only resources” that are guaranteed to save you the time and effort of having to track such premium content down on your own, ultimately helping you to solve Tableau sticking to data your toughest IT challenges more effectively—and faster—than ever before. mission under Salesforce
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Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?
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