Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Web Services, AWS Data Pipeline, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Business Processes, Workflow

New AWS Pipeline Tool Aims to Make Effective Use of Your Business Data

AWS Pipeline Diagram

Amazon’s new AWS Data Pipeline product “will help you move, sort, filter, reformat, analyze, and report on  data in order to make use of it in a scalable fashion. ” You can now automate the movement and processing of any amount of data using data-driven workflows and built-in dependency checking.

A Pipeline is composed of a set of data sources, preconditions, destinations, processing steps, and an operational schedule, all definied in a Pipeline Definition.

The definition specifies where the data comes from, what to do with it, and where to store it. You can create a Pipeline Definition in the AWS Management Console or externally, in text form.

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Licensed to Print Money (In the Cloud)

One of the major issues facing cloud service providers is the expense of building out infrastructure without knowing how or when revenues will follow. As a result, cloud providers are reevaluating their approach to hardware and software investments and engaging with technology and networking vendors to develop creative pricing models that are aligned with cloud business principles and engineered to reduce risks.
In a perfect world, cloud service providers would pay for infrastructure only after a customer has made a purchase – in order to maintain a tight correlation between revenues and expenses. In the real world, however, implementing this type of model is easier said than done. This was especially true during the ‘iron’ age, when hardware and software were highly coupled and there were very few alternatives to big vendors that focused on selling high-dollar, high-performance networking gear.

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SiSense Out to Democratize Big Data Analytics

Tel Aviv-based start-up SiSense Ltd raised $8 million and bought a ticket to California, where it’s set up shop across the street from Oracle, a definite competitor.
See, SiSense, which obviously has a sense of humor, has a business intelligence tool dubbed Prism that it calls the “world’s smallest Big Data analytics solution.” It can crunch a terabyte of data on a sub-$750 laptop with 8GB of RAM.
The company’s Elasticube technology with its in-memory columnar data store, strong data compression, parallel processing and advanced query optimization is supposed to offer analytical processing power previously available only with high-end solutions.
It claims non-technical users can analyze 100 times more data at least 10 times the speed of current in-memory analytics solutions.

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Business Intelligence, ClickFuel, Fuel Station, Venture Funding

ClickFuel Gets $4 Million for Fuel Station Expansion

ClickFuel recently closed a $4 million Series B Round with Baird Venture Partners among the participants. The investment will be used to develop new products and services to expand the use of Fuel Station in data and business intelligence applications.

Fuel Station is a SaaS-based marketing analytics and performance management solution tailored for small to medium-sized businesses, providing more than 200,000 activated dashboards for SMBs to access, track and monitor marketing initiatives and results. Through more than two dozen partners, Fuel Station addresses the challenge SMBs face in maximizing online marketing spending, tracking campaign effectiveness and reducing the time necessary to analyze campaign data.

With Fuel Station, ClickFuel partners such as The E.W. Scripps Company, DudaMobile and Propel Marketing, a GateHouse Media company, provide their SMB customers with comprehensive marketing dashboards that address the complexity of marketing and advertising campaign performance. This dashboard delivers data on a single platform to empower decision-making and improve campaign productivity and presence. ClickFuel partners also leverage Fuel Station’s back-end business intelligence platform to improve account managers’ efficiency, differentiate their businesses in the crowded media industry, increase customer lifetime value and reduce customer churn.

“The Fuel Station dashboard has quickly become an invaluable tool for our account executives from coast to coast,” said Adam Symson, chief digital officer of Scripps, a leading media enterprise. “Our television stations and newspapers are focused on providing the market’s most-effective solutions for our advertisers, and Fuel Station makes it possible to measure and track our success so customers have actionable evidence that we’re helping them build their businesses.”

“Providing our customers with transparency into their marketing investments across all mediums helps us build trust and lasting relationships with them. As a convergent resource that fully integrates all components of a marketing campaign from pay-per-click to behavioral analytics to call tracking, Fuel Station makes it easy for our clients to visualize their campaigns and returns on investment, and helps our account managers better serve our customers,” said Dave Myer, director of advertising operations at DudaMobile, anonline platform that converts websites into mobile friendly websites.


Cloud computing, Information technology, Research

Research and Markets: Potential of Cloud Computing

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “Potential of Cloud Computing” report to their offering.

First there was the advent of the Internet that changed the manner in which we do business forever. Now, with the advent of cloud computing, the world is ready to undergo another major shift in terms of technology.

Cloud computing is an internet-based process that makes it possible to share information, software and even resources from computers to other devices all through the internet. The concept of cloud computing brings forth a new delivery model for IT services that are conducting businesses over the Internet. The process generally involves provision of scalable and virtualized resources over the internet. Not only does the process provide ease-of-access, but the speed and overall reliability of the entire concept of cloud computing is changing the IT industry rapidly.

Taiyou Research presents an analysis of the Potential of Cloud Computing.

Key Topics Covered:

1. Executive Summary

2. Overview of Cloud Computing

3. Market Profile

4. Benefits of Deploying the Cloud

5. Cost Benefits to Organizations from Cloud Systems

6. Cloud Computing Delivery Modes

7. Cloud Computing Deployment Models

8. Understanding the Concept behind Cloud Computing

9. Application Programming Interfaces

10. Cloud Computing Taxonomy

11. Deployment Process of the Cloud System

12. Technical Features of Cloud Systems

13. Understanding Cloud Clients

14. Regulatory Landscape & Investment

15. Commercializing of Cloud Computing

16. Concepts Related to Cloud Computing

17. Cloud Computing versus Other Computing Paradigms

18. Cloud Exchanges and Markets Worldwide

19. Research Projects on Cloud Computing

20. Cloud Computing Case Studies

21. Future of Cloud Computing

22. Market Leaders

23. Appendix

24. Glossary


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AWS Heads Up-Market with Redshift

Amazon Web Services used re:Invent, its very first customer and partner conference this week in Vegas, to announce the coming of a cloud data warehouse service called Redshift meant to undercut and disrupt the pricey “old guard” brands of Oracle, IBM, Teradata, EMC Greenplum and HP.
Redshift literally represents a shift in Amazon’s targeting.
It’s going up-market looking for customers among the big corporates that have supposedly overcome their doubts about running mission-critical apps in the public cloud and are now down to figuring out which ones to move first and how quickly.

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Service Concepts 101

The use of the term ‘Service’ is somewhat overloaded. Everyone will have heard or used the terms Business Services, IT Services, Software Services, and now Cloud Services, and yet often there is much confusion and misunderstanding in their use.As my colleague David Sprott suggested in a CBDI Journal Report, «Everything is a Service» . In that report David suggested that the idea that «everything is a service» could be developed to clarify the taxonomy for Cloud Services and Services in the form of a Unified Service Model that would deliver convergence of business and IT perspectives.Consequently, I have penned a research note available on Everware-CBDI site , that provides a concept model that explores the basic concepts of Service and Service-Orientation taking into account this broad perspective including Business Service, IT Services, Software Services, Cloud Services and even Human Services.

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BitYota Start-Up Launches Data-Warehouse-as-a-Service

Another one of Andreessen Horowitz’s seemingly endless supply of gold-tinged start-ups whose future is supposed to be theirs to lose has come out of start-up hiding to proclaim the existence of its newfangled SaaS-style data-warehouse-as-a-service for Big Data analytics running initially on Amazon.
It’s called BitYota – a name derived from the combination of the smallest element of computer storage and the yotta, the biggest number, or 1024 – and besides Andreessen Horowitz BitYota’s $12 million in seed and Series A funding comes from Globespan Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership, Dawn Capital, Crosslink Capital, Morado Ventures and individual investors like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang; Yahoo board member and former eBay COO, angel investor Maynard Webb; investor and financial writer Graham Summers; and MapReduce BitYota-like start-up ClearStory Data founder and Marc Andreessen buddy Sharmila Mulligan, who’s evidently spreading her bets on Big Data analytics.

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SYS-CON.tv: Cloud and Big Data – What’s Working, What’s New?

Which of the recent big acquisitions within the Cloud and/or Big Data space have most grabbed your attention as a sign of things to come? In this Lunchtime Power Panel at the 11th International Cloud Expo, chaired by Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Treb Ryan, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloud Business Unit, at Dimension Data; Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore; Rags Srinivasan, Director of Product Management at Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group; John «Jay» Jarrell, President and CEO of Objectivity; Aaron Hollobaugh, VP of Marketing & Communications at Hostway Corporation; and Praveen Kankariya, Founder and CEO of Impetus Technologies discussed this topic and more.

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I’m An Opera-phile. How About You?

I switched over to the Opera browser the other day on my main work computer. The Oslo-based Opera Software has only been able to grab about 2% of the browser market, but at least this number has remained fairly steady for almost a decade. It may gain momentum in the mobile space as the company focuses on it and as smartphones continue to proliferate.

I switched because I consider IE to be disease-laden, Firefox to be a memory hog, and hey, Google Chrome has been acting funky on me recently. Things crash, Flash keeps needing to be installed, etc. Opera also seems to give me a clearer view, something my old eyes appreciate.

This led me to wonder about browser market share. I remember a few years back, before Chrome, when Firefox was steadily eating about 1 percentage point per month of marketshare from IE. What’s been going on lately?

I found some stats put together by the Refsnes gang, three Norwegian siblings who’ve been tracking browser market share for the past decade. This family’s company W3 Schools offers oodles of online instruction, and is not without controversy. However, it looks to me as if its browser stats are solid.

The years between 2002 and 2012 show a shocking downfall of Internet Explorer from 86% to 16%. Does this tell you all you need to know about Microsoft’s performance over the past decade?

Meanwhile, Firefox had an immediate 16% share when it emerged from Mozilla’s shadows in 2005. It rose to almost 48% in mid-2009 (compared to IE at 39%). Even at that time, Chrome (introduced late in 2008) had garnered 7% of the market.

Today, Chrome holds 45% of the market, Firefox has 32%, and IE the afore-mentioned 16%. Safari (which is my iPad browser) toodles along at about 4%.

For now, I’m proud to a “2 per center” who likes Opera. I have no idea what any of this marketshare means, other than it presents challenges for website developers who need their stuff to look good in any window, so to speak. I’m curious, though, why people use the browser they use. Tweet me with your opinion.

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