Are you ready for IBM Watson?

This week marks the one year anniversary of the IBM Watson computer system succeeding at Jeopardy!. Since then, IBM has gotten a lot of interest in Watson.  Companies want one of those. But what exactly is Watson and what makes it unique?  What does it mean to have a Watson?  And, how is commercial Watson [...]

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics: IBM

Next in my discussion of big data providers is IBM.   Big data plays right into IBM’s portfolio of solutions in the information management space.  It also dove tails very nicely with the company’s Smarter Planet strategy.  Smarter Planet holds the vision of the world as a more interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent place.  IBM’s Smarter Cities [...]

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics Part 1: Attensity

I am often asked whether it is the vendors or the end users who are driving the Big Data market. I usually reply that both are. There are early adopters of any technology that push the vendors to evolve their own products and services. The vendors then show other companies what can be done with [...]

Five basic questions to ask before leaping into low cost social media monitoring

I just finished testing two low cost (<$50.00/mo) social media monitoring tools. They were both easy to use with clean user interfaces. Both had some nice features, especially around reaching back out to people making comments in social media. However, running these two services side by side brought home some issues with these kinds of [...]

Five Analytics Predictions for 2011

In 2011 analytics will take center stage as a key trend because companies are at a tipping point with the volume of data they have and their urgent need to do something about it. So, with 2010 now past and 2011 to look forward to, I wanted to take the opportunity to submit my predictions [...]

What is advanced analytics?

There has been a lot of discussion recently around advanced analytics. I’d like to throw my definition into the rink. I spent many years at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s and 1990s deploying what I would call advanced analytics. This included utilizing statistical and mathematical models to understand customer behavior, predict retention, or analyze [...]

Advanced Analytics and the skills needed to make it happen: Takeaways from IBM IOD

Advanced Analytics was a big topic at the IBM IOD conference last week. As part of this, predictive analytics was again an important piece of the story along with other advanced analytics capabilities IBM has developed or is in the process of developing to support optimization. These include Big Insights (for big data), analyzing data [...]

Who is using advanced analytics?

Advanced analytics is currently a hot topic among businesses, but who is actually using it and why? What are the challenges and benefits to those companies that are using advanced analytics? And, what is keeping some companies from exploring this technology? Hurwitz & Associates would like your help in answering a short (5 min) survey [...]

Analyzing Big Data

The term “Big Data” has gained popularity over the past 12-24 months as a) amounts of data available to companies continually increase and b) technologies have emerged to more effectively manage this data. Of course, large volumes of data have been around for a long time. For example, I worked in the telecommunications industry for [...]

Social Network Analysis: What is it and why should we care?

When most people think of social networks they think of Facebook and Twitter, but social network analysis has its roots in psychology, sociology, anthropology and math (see Scott, John Social Network Analysis for more details). The phrase has a number of different definitions, depending on the discipline you’re interested in, but for the purposes of [...]