The business value of analytics has never been greater. But enterprises are flooded with a deluge of data spread across analyst desktops, big data stores, data warehouses and marts, transaction systems and the cloud. How do analysts overcome these data challenges?
Data is the lifeblood of analytics-the more diverse the better. In their best-selling book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier describe the synergy that occurs when previously unrelated and disparate data is brought together to uncover hidden insights. But these advanced analytics data requirements are a double-edged sword as these more diverse sources complicate data integration and constrain progress.
Navigating Cloud Automation Economics
One of the key aspects of cloud’s value to an organization is the way in which its implementation and processes can impact the bottom line of a business. Automation, in particular, is an issue in the cloud that can have a major effect on cost, and there are two major ways to think about what generates the automation ethos that informs a company’s cloud strategy.
From the engineering perspective, if something needs to be done more than once, it should be automated. This saves times and effort, becomes a repeatable task, and since it was automated, everything comes out uniform. All of these
Business considerations are the other main drivers for automation. Is it cheaper to implement a human solution to a problem, or is it cheaper to install a piece of software? Regardless of the engineering ethos, when a business gets to the level of asking these questions, there are cases where it’s cheaper to utilize human power or where it’s cheaper to rely on a machine powered solution or a combo thereof.
Health Care Cloud Computing Saves ‘Obama Care’
Interview with CEO Brad Bostic – hc1.com is committed to improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. We believe a critical ingredient to averting the current healthcare crisis faced by the US can only occur by improving the way healthcare professionals across the continuum of care manage and coordinate the relationships between each other and with the patients they serve.
Brad Bostic: hc1.com is committed to improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. We believe a critical ingredient to averting the current healthcare crisis faced by the US can only occur by improving the way healthcare professionals across the continuum of care manage and coordinate the relationships between each other and with the patients they serve. When an individual encounters a healthcare setting – whether to proactively have a physical or to be diagnosed and subsequently treated for a given health issue – there are multiple entities and individuals who are involved with the provision of care whether the patient knows it or not. For example, what is the first thing your primary care physician does when you pay them a visit? They almost always take a blood draw. This draw initiates the process of laboratory testing which often occurs within a lab business that is external to your physician’s office. This simple example illustrates the fact that healthcare is comprised of many entities and individuals who must be coordinated in order to provide high quality care, in a timely manner, at a reasonable cost.
IBM Debuts Cloud Portfolio Targeted at C-Suite
“The cloud opportunity is helping C-suite leaders reshape customer experience,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader Smarter Commerce, IBM Global Business Services, as IBM today unveiled an extensive array of cloud solutions designed for the C-suite.
“As part of IBM’s digital front office strategy, we see these 100 cloud applications as a way for business leaders to improve customer experience, reach new customers, generate new revenue streams and become more competitive in their industry,” Papas continued.
Gartner predicts CRM will be a $36bn market by 2017
The latest enterprise software forecast from Gartner shows Customer Relationship Management (CRM) increasing to a $36.5B worldwide market by 2017, a significant increase from the $20.6B forecasted in Q1 of this year. CRM also leads all enterprise software categories in projected growth, showing a 15.1% CAGR from 2012 to 2017, also revised up from 9.7% in the Q1 forecast.
The latest round of forecasts published in the report, Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012-2017, 2Q13 Update shows CRM eclipsing ERP in worldwide market size in 2017.
The following graph compares the relative growth of CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence (BI), Supply Chain Management and Web Conferencing, Collaboration/Social Software Suites. Source: Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012-2017, 2Q13 Update. Please click on the image to increase its size for easier reading.
Key Take-Aways
- Comparing Gartner’s Q1 and Q2 CRM forecasts shows just how fast …
IBM Debuts Cloud Portfolio Targeted at C-Suite
“The cloud opportunity is helping C-suite leaders reshape customer experience,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader Smarter Commerce, IBM Global Business Services. “As part of IBM’s digital front office strategy, we see these 100 cloud applications as a way for business leaders to improve customer experience, reach new customers, generate new revenue streams and become more competitive in their industry.”
Icahn Now Dell’s Largest Outside Stockholder
Last Friday calm seemed to be descending on Round Rock, Texas.
Reports were circulating that activist shareholder Carl Icahn was losing the stomach for scuttling the Michael Dell-Silver Lake Management plan to buy the company for $24.4 billion and take it private.
Health Care Cloud Computing Saves ‘Obama Care’
Interview with CEO Brad Bostic – hc1.com is committed to improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. We believe a critical ingredient to averting the current healthcare crisis faced by the US can only occur by improving the way healthcare professionals across the continuum of care manage and coordinate the relationships between each other and with the patients they serve.
Brad Bostic: hc1.com is committed to improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. We believe a critical ingredient to averting the current healthcare crisis faced by the US can only occur by improving the way healthcare professionals across the continuum of care manage and coordinate the relationships between each other and with the patients they serve. When an individual encounters a healthcare setting – whether to proactively have a physical or to be diagnosed and subsequently treated for a given health issue – there are multiple entities and individuals who are involved with the provision of care whether the patient knows it or not. For example, what is the first thing your primary care physician does when you pay them a visit? They almost always take a blood draw. This draw initiates the process of laboratory testing which often occurs within a lab business that is external to your physician’s office. This simple example illustrates the fact that healthcare is comprised of many entities and individuals who must be coordinated in order to provide high quality care, in a timely manner, at a reasonable cost.
Cloud-Based DevOps
By working with IT across the software development lifecycle via cloud-based DevOps, development teams can decrease software bottlenecks, increase code output and be seen as drivers of the business.
I have a confession. I am Shadow IT. I am the guilty party operations and security love to hate because I expense tens of thousands of dollars in cloud services…every month. Truth be told, my team and I couldn’t afford to wait in line for IT to provision the resources we needed to begin work. We had goals to meet and objectives to achieve – all of which didn’t include waiting in line for IT to give us virtual machines, development platforms or set up sandboxes so we could begin work.
With a lengthy approval process and cost justifications, there was no way I would have been able to secure either the physical infrastructure or cloud vendor approvals I needed to achieve the business unit’s goals. And, honestly, the risk of choosing a vendor that would leak our data, or otherwise put the business at risk, seemed a lot lower than the risk of not getting my job done.
So, even though my monthly cloud bill continued to rise, it didn’t surprise me too much that I was never questioned about the expense because my team was delivering. And, that is exactly what everyone from the business side of things cares about – is development creating new applications and/or services that can be brought to market before the competition? Can we secure ‘first-mover’ status or market leadership because development is firing on all cylinders? These are the questions marketing, business development, and other teams ask. Not, did central IT get you those VMs you needed?
Open Source in the Cloud – How Much Should You Care?
n the cloud doesn’t matter whether you are running on an Open Source platform or not – it is NOT free because you pay for the service. And for long Open Source project have been funded through the services premiums that you pay. I would argue that Open Source vendors have mastered the way they can take profit from Open Source services and are far ahead than the proprietary vendors. The whole catch here is that you pay nothing for the software and incur no capital expenditures (CapEx) but you pay for the services (i.e. Operational Expenditures or OpEx) – remember, this is also the cloud model. Bottom line is that you may be better off with a propriatery vendor than an open source one, because the former need to yet master that business model.