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Business Intelligence + Big Data
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August 2013 Welcome to this month's edition of iOLAP iNSIGHTS. In this issue Doug Slemmer, iOLAP President, talks about avoiding the elusive "Magic Unicorns" of Big Data by considering often overlooked points about Hadoop and its potential for saving your company time and money. Charles Yorek provides some food for thought when defining your new Mobile BI project.
We are heading into the busy fall season of events and webinars so don't forget to check out the upcoming calendar of events.
The iOLAP Team
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 Trends, News and SoundBytes
Oracle Quietly Slashes BI Prices. Oracle recently reduced the prices of its BI Foundation Suite, most likely in response to increased competition.
Click here for more information.
AWS Redshift Releases New Features and Built-in Functions. AWS recently updated their popular new Redshift data warehousing platform with some new upgrades. Click here for more information.
Syncsort Releases Tool to Help with Hadoop ETL. With increasing use by large companies to use Hadoop for batch processing, it makes sense to have an ETL tool designed for Hadoop. Click here for a review of these capabilities.
To Go Faster, Break The Rules. Check out this interesting blog from iOLAP friend Wayne Eckerson as he attempts to help you navigate the waters of keeping your BI customers happy. Click here to connect to his blog.
iOLAP Announces Consulting Partner Agreement with Amazon's Redshift Cloud Data Warehouse Platform. Click here to download the press release.
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 What's On My Mind: Avoiding the Magic Unicorn SyndromeDoug Slemmer, iOLAP President and CEO
We've all read the articles where someone with a massive data set unleashes the power of Big Data and discovers an awesome and magical insight about their customers that changes the course of history as we know it. We like to call them
Magical Big Data Unicorns-so frequently discussed and pursued, but so rarely seen in the wild! We're not saying they don't exist, but we would like to suggest a better approach to getting solid ROI from these new-fangled Big Data tools.
For example, when many data gurus think of Hadoop, they think of analyzing huge, unstructured datasets that will uncover important corporate insights. It feels like everyone is marketing the power of Hadoop to find that priceless gold nugget buried within petabytes of social media, blogs, emails, reviews, clicks and chats. Because those stories have great anecdotal power behind them, they can often light the imaginations of business users and help vendors sell new products. Just like a Magical Unicorn.
What is not as frequently advertised and discussed is the ability for Hadoop to help organizations save really big IT dollars in far less dramatic ways. These scenarios don't make for cool infographics or fascinating Nate Silver data epiphanies, but they are absolutely meaningful techniques for significantly reducing IT costs.
Click here to read the rest of the article on the iOLAP blog.
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 Tech Tip: Achieving Success with Mobile BI Charles Yorek, iOLAP Managing Partner
Recently I was at a client site discussing the impressive adoption rate of a Mobile BI project that had just gone into production compared to some previous similar projects that had not fared as well. As we white-boarded the particulars of each application's adoption, we realized that the main difference was how each project had come to be in the first place.
The lackluster projects had started as a request to 'mobilize' an existing set of reports in an effort to give the users in the field another option in terms of delivery method. The successful project was a completely new reporting request. Once we realized this important difference, the applications themselves began to take on a different look and feel. Clearly, the successful application was "better" because it was designed to take much more advantage of the capabilities offered by the Mobile BI platform being used.
As I thought about this over the past few weeks, I thought back to the other Mobile BI projects that I have seen and quickly realized that all too often the BI community is failing to understand that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift.
Click here to read the rest of the article on the iOLAP blog.
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iOLAP Celebrates Milestone in its Offshore
BI Development Center
European Team Completes Two Years of Successful Project Development
It's hard to believe how fast the last two years have gone by since, after extensive research, iOLAP opened its first off-shore development center in Rejika, Croatia, on the beautiful Adriatic coast (about a two hour drive from Venice, Italy). This outstanding group of dedicated employees has been instrumental in helping our U.S. managers on important, large projects where the ability to offer lower-cost, high-quality development was critical. Over the past two years we have worked diligently to create a fully operational and trained team that can offer outstanding results to our clients at prices that are substantially lower, often by 50-70%. Our U.S. team oversees the entire project and creates a true team partnership to help you reach your deliverable and financial goals. The offshore development team members are technology experts, and know and use the same products, tools, systems and platforms that you use to develop and deliver Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Big Data and Analytics solutions to your customers. Just like our U.S. consulting staff, these consultants are trained and certified in many of the major Business Intelligence, Big Data, and Data Integration technologies including, but not limited to MicroStrategy, Business Objects, Cognos, OBIEE, DataStage, Informatica, IBM/Netezza, Talend, Teradata, Oracle, Microsoft, Yellowfin, Syncsort, Cloudera, AWS Redshift, and Mobile BI. Congratulations to the Croatia team for two years of outstanding effort and results! To read more about iOLAP's offshore development center, click here.
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Mobile BI Webinar presented by iOLAP on, " The Importance of Mobile BI User Interface (UI) Design," September 5, 2013, hosted by Charles Yorek, iOLAP Managing Partner. Click here for details and to register.
iOLAP presents IBM's Big Data Platform, September 8, 2013. We will be hosting the event at the Dallas Cowboys opening night game vs. the New York Giants. Please email scrofts@iolap.com for details.
iOLAP presents IBM's Big Data Platform, October 17, 2013. We will be hosting the event at the TopGolf facility in Allen, Texas. Please email scrofts@iolap.com for details.
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iOLAP, Inc. (www.iolap.com) is a Dallas-based strategic data consultancy specializing in Data Warehousing (DW), Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data strategy and solutions.
iOLAP is completely focused on these markets and bring a client-centric and business-focused perspective to all of our engagements. iOLAP has been in business since 1999 with in-depth expertise across all DW and BI technology areas, including the newest leading-edge Business Analytics and Big Data architectures. iOLAP serves some of the world's largest companies across all major industries.
iOLAP is a frequent contributor to important global thought leadership on Business Intelligence and Big Data.
or call us at (214) 618-5000
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