Sybase IQ: July 2010 Archives - BeyeBLOGS.com - The Business Intelligence Blog Community

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July 29, 2010

Join Us at Techwave

TechWave 2010 is fast approaching! Join us in Washington DC, August 9 – 11, and benefit from industry leading technology sessions focused on analytics in business - delivering the technological vision, insights and actionable answers needed to drive profitability and growth in your business. To view a list of sessions and build your agenda, view the Sybase Session Catalog.

Attendees at TechWave 2010 will learn what’s new with Sybase IQ, sharpen their skills, and see through the eyes of other Sybase IQ professionals facing many of the same challenges that they handle every day. Two sessions that you especially won’t want to miss:

Real-time Replication into Sybase IQ – New with Replication Server 15.5 is the ability to replicate directly into Sybase IQ in real-time, without a loss of performance. This session describes the architecture and capabilities of this new feature.
In-database analytics with FuzzyLogix – How can your business unlock the enormous value stored in the mountains of data you possess by adopting predictive analytics? The in-database analytics solution offered by Sybase IQ and Fuzzy Logix will solve the problem for you at amazing speed, with minimal training required.

This is your chance to create your own customized migration plan from your Sybase IQ 12 environment to Sybase IQ 15 with a Sybase IQ Technical expert. Book your free one hour session now to whiteboard a customized migration solution just for you. Call Jennifer Buchanan at 519-883-6280 or email jbuchana@sybase.com to set up your appointment.

This is just a small example of the high-value training available at TechWave. Factor in topical keynotes, face time with Sybase engineers and social networking with like-minded colleagues – and you have a program you can’t afford to miss!

Posted by Sybase IQ at 9:30 PM

July 28, 2010

The Analytics Surge

The Economic Times presents a run-down, in slideshow form, of the impact that a surge of interest in and uptake of analytics is having on the business climate in India. For industries as diverse as financial services, retail and consulting analytics is becoming an integral part of how business decisions are made.

One of the trends cited is one we talk about often at Sybase — the “democratization” of data and, by extension, of analytics. Our answer to democratized data is summed up in our vision for the unwired enterprise, which we define as one that:

Breaks down information technology barriers and delivers critical information and applications to employees, partners, and customers, to any platform, device or network, anytime, anywhere.

Is more efficient, more productive, and better able to capitalize on new opportunities because information is moved to the point of action, increasing its relevance and enhancing the power of decisions and transactions.

The idea of moving information to the point of action is integral to this surge of interest in and use of analytics. Success in business has always depended on putting the right information into the hands of a key decision-maker, or perhaps a few key decision-makers. In today’s environment, the amount of information is vast, the timeframe in which decisions must be made is fleeting, the factors driving those decisions are growing ever more complex, and the decision-makers are no longer an elite few, but a growing percentage of the day-to-day workforce.

It’s the fundamental shift in how business is done that represents the real surge. Technological solutions designed to deliver such capabilities are the result, not the cause, of these disruptive changes.

This distinction is summed up quite well in the Economic Times article by a spokesperson from ICICI Bank *:

Analytics has emerged as a key differentiator in times of volatility in the external macro environment. The ability to provide customer level strategies while dealing with large masses emerges as a big force multiplier for large organisations.

Businesses are not looking for new technologies to adopt. They are looking for ways to differentiate their offerings, to manage volatility, to increase customer satisfaction. Those are the true drivers behind the analytics surge.

* We should note here that ICICI Bank has a great story to tell about its own success with analytics.

Posted by Sybase IQ at 1:16 AM

July 21, 2010

What is Analytics?

That’s one of those questions that should have a simple and straightforward answer, but in fact has dozens of answers (not all of which are either simple or straightforward.)

Addressing a closely related question, Thomas Wailgum at CIO is wondering just exactly what we mean by the term “BI.” These two questions are linked because the two areas of expertise are closely linked, and because another question that often gets raised is “What is the difference between BI and analytics?” (or vice-versa.)

In fact, Tom Davenport, one of Wailgum’s panel of experts (along with Merv Adrian and others) offers the following:

I view BI as all the things that organizations do to make sense of data for purposes of managing an organization better. To me it includes reporting and analytics, though there is much more of the former than the latter. However, I sense that the BI term is rapidly being supplanted by “business analytics.”

Tom is absolutely correct in setting out analytics as a subset of Business Intelligence. Analytics is one of the “things organizations do” to transform data into effective business decisions, but it isn’t the only one. At Sybase, when distinguishing between the two categories that we have labeled Reporting and Advanced Analytics, we first look at whether data is simply being formatted and summarized, or whether deeper patterns within the data are being sought after and explored. Advanced analytics generally requires extensive ad-hoc analysis as well as consideration of many more variables than are likely to be incorporated in a simple report. The goal of an advanced analytics environment is often forecasting — providing a sufficiently detailed analysis of what has come before in order to make plausible predictions of what will come next. The term “predictive analytics” is often used to describe such applications, but it’s important to note that any sufficiently complex analysis can be considered advanced analytics even if it does not provide a prediction or forecast.

For example, any time that human behavior is being analyzed, that’s most likely advanced analytics. To be sure, businesses often analyze behavior in order to make a prediction about an individual will do next — Buy more of the same? Buy something else? Default on payment? — but they can also use behavioral analyses to determine how effectively their systems and processes meet customer expectations, how well they have done at holding the target market’s attention, and related questions.

The vital distinction is this: advanced analytics involves more than just slicing and dicing of the data. The data has to be evaluated for key trends and patterns, which are abstracted into a model. When new data is gathered it is run against the model. To give a very simple example, analysis of customer purchasing trends may reveal correlations between a customer’s past buying behavior, geographic location, income, and likelihood to purchase one of several new products. When a customer carries out a transaction, his or her behavior and profile are compared with, or scored against, the model in order to predict the likelihood that a particular offer will succeed.

Ultimately, it’s this reliance on models that sets advanced analytics apart from other types of BI analysis. When a business takes a look at data to try to improve decisions and performance, that’s business intelligence. When a business compares incoming data with a model in order to achieve deeper understanding, deal with human behavior in real time, or predict what’s going to happen next, that’s advanced analytics.

Posted by Sybase IQ at 5:27 PM

July 16, 2010

Sybase IQ - Making Data Easy to Consume

There are many approaches to decision making –evidence based, algorithmic, intuitive, dictatorial, and consensual – and the course of action should be tailored to fit the particular characteristics of the situation. However, most business leaders operating in today’s highly competitive environment would agree that making critical decisions without supporting data is folly. The challenge is getting quick and easy access to substantive analysis in order to make timely decisions.

This blog is a follow on to Phil’s “Just Like TV” post below. Mike Vizard writes in his blog, ”The Rebirth of Business Intelligence” (http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/vizard/the-rebirth-of-business-intelligence/?cs=42070, that users want easy access to BI from the application environment they are working in. They don’t want to leave that environment to access a separate BI tool. Increasingly, application developers are embedding BI directly into the application, such as spreadsheets. ”Ease of use” is critical to adoption of BI. Claudia Imhoff talks about ”ease of consumption” in her blog entitled ”Easy to Use? Nah. We Need BI that is Easy To Consume” (http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/imhoff/archives/2009/02/easy_to_use_-_n.php). Her point is that consuming data is more than ”just an isolated viewing of data points or reports”, or the manipulation of pretty pictures. BI is about easy consumption of data that adds to ”complete and full comprehension of a situation, event or activity”.

The thrust of BI is accessibility to good intelligence derived from real data. Sybase IQ 15 includes support for a variety of programming languages and interfaces that you can use to build and deploy database applications – it offers support for .NET, OLD DB and ADO development environments, Perl scripting, Python and PHP, along with the traditional ODBC and JDBC interfaces. With Sybase IQ, you can integrate access to data analytics within multiple application environments – offering ease of use and ease of BI consumption for good decision making.

Posted by Sybase IQ at 6:01 PM

Sybase IQ – Making Data Easy to Consume

Posted by Sybase IQ at 6:01 PM

July 15, 2010

Just Like TV

Over at ITBusinessEdge, Mike Vizard presents some interesting analysis of why more widespread use of BI is not occurring within organizations, and what he thinks will ultimately drive higher rates of adoption:

There are plenty of reasons, ranging from cost of application licenses to reliance on spreadsheets. But the biggest issue might be that using a BI application seems unnatural — the data first has to be imported, then users have to leave the application environment in which they are working in to access BI.

According to JasperSoft CEO Brian Gentile, application developers are rapidly becoming more aware of this issue and increasingly embedding BI directly into their applications. Open source makes it easier and less expensive to do so without having to develop that functionality themselves. Gentile says BI capabilities are well on their way to becoming a standard component of other applications.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of stand-alone BI applications. But the number of people accessing BI software within another application environment will dwarf the number using stand-alone BI software, who tend to be business analysts.

There is no question that enterprise application vendors have added and (will continue to add) BI capability to their environments, from simple reporting and dashboards in some instances to fairly sophisticated analytical capability in others. And Mike may well prove prophetic in his assertion that there will one day be more people accessing BI capability via these applications than via dedicated BI software.

Interestingly, that doesn’t mean that there will be fewer people accessing dedicated BI and analytics software than exist today. Let’s analogize for a moment and liken analytics capability to video content. Like analytics, video content can be accessed in a number of ways. You can use a TV, which is a dedicated environment analogous to BI / analytics system, or you can access video as an auxiliary function of some other device — laptop, smart phone, SUV — which is similar to accessing analytics capability within an enterprise application. Although more and more people are accessing more and more video content via these other methods, the number of TVs and the number of people watching them has hardly gone down. If anything, it has increased significantly.

Likewise, the number of users of analytics systems is increasing rapidly. Some of these users may, indeed, find it “unnatural” to have to leave the application in order to do analyses on their data. On the other hand, most of them were already leaving that environment to access those incomplete, inconsistent, and time-consuming spreadsheets. The reality is that it isn’t just the number of analytics users that’s growing, it’s the level of sophistication that all BI and analytics users require. As these users grow more sophisticated in their requirements, many will make analytical demands that enterprise systems will have a very difficult time fulfilling.

Why? Well, first there’s a problem of scope / feature creep. Development teams supporting enterprise applications find it challenging enough just keeping up with the demands placed on the core business processes they support. They are happy to provide reporting and analysis of data related to these processes (up to a point), but in light of the demand for increasingly broad and deep analytics capability, left unchecked they might ultimately find themselves supporting analytics / BI systems which also happen to have some operational features!

Moreover, as analytical needs grow more sophsiticated, the importance of having the correct underlying infrastructure becomes increasingly clear. One day we may well have a data management technology that can be simultaneously configured to provide optimal results for both analysis and transactions, but we aren’t there yet. Today, putting both functions against a single data source requires making sacrifices either to transactional performance, analytical performance, or both. With demands for both analytical and transactional performance growing rapidly, users are not likely to embrace those sacrifices.

So, yes, BI and analytical functions will continue to be embedded within enterprise applications, and the number of people using these capabilities will grow rapidly. At the same time, dedicated BI and analytical systems will be more widely accessed than ever before, supporting increasingly robust and sophisticated capabilities. One does not come at the expense of the other, any more than millions of Youtube views cut into sales of widescreen LCD HD TVs. They both just keep growing together.

Posted by Sybase IQ at 3:45 PM

July 9, 2010

Summer School

I almost gave this entry the title “Back to School,” but as a kid I always hated it when, seemingly right around the Fourth of July, the stores all started up their back-to-school promotions.

“Too Soon!” I would invariably lament. “Can’t this wait a few weeks?”

Much more timely is the recent introduction of The Analytics Performance Series, a Sybase-sponsored certification program offered via Beye UNIVERSITY. This four-part program provides an overview of analytics performance from both a business and technical perspective. Organizations increasingly rely on their analytics infrastructures to power rapid and complex decisions, to track performance in real time, and to monitor risks and opportunities. With so much riding on the analytics infrastructure, analytics performance becomes critical.

To deliver the courses, we put together a Dream Team of BI and Analytics experts to step participants through a better understanding of the crucial role that analytics performance plays in today’s business. Here’s a quick description of the four courses that make up the certification series:

Part One: The Warning Signs Claudia Imhoff lays out the Seven Early Warning Signs that your analytics infrastructure is not ready for current or future business challenges.

Part Two: High Performance Analytics Architectures David Loshin explores typical architectural paradigms for high performance analytics databases, looking at the types of reporting and analytics usage scenarios and then considering architectural suitability of the different approaches to those usage scenarios.

Part Three: Performance Advances In Analytics Seth Grimes discusses new technologies and capabilities that businesses are using to take their analytics to the next level: in-database analytics, text-analytics, and web-enabled analytics.

Part 4: Four-Phase Approach to Analytics Claudia Imhoff discusses the attributes that a company that utilizes analytics effectively has. She also steps through the four-phase approach to analytics maturity.

The Analytics Performance Series is aimed at everyone involved in managing analytics environments, as well as the business users of these environments. Anyone who is responsible for, or who relies upon, analytics performance will gain a better understanding of what is at stake and how to move forward.

And surely that’s worth taking a summer class (or four.)

Posted by Sybase IQ at 10:21 PM

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