Analytics

Business IT solution development generally follows specific trends and overlapping eras. The first, calculation, occurred as digital products and services wholly replaced adding machines and other mechanical business devices. The second, computation, mirrored the evolution of digitized solutions for...

The tweets were flying this week, and not just about Beyonce and blackouts at the Super Bowl. Twitter was itself the subject of tweets following the announcement late Monday that it had inked a deal to buy social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs. Terms were not disclosed. Bluefin Labs, founded in 2008...

Facebook's recently announced beta of its new Graph Search resulted in the sorts of stories and headlines one has come to expect from a company whose every move is subject to media dissection. Some were skeptical about the value of the feature, especially its built-in restrictions: leveraging Facebo...

Bronto Software this week released a significant update to its Bronto Marketing Platform: a remarketing engine that helps retailers link online and in-store purchases in order to create targeted email messages that speak to the individual user. New features allow marketers to collect data such as pu...

SAP last week released SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, which marries its popular integrated applications with its high performance business analytics platform. SAP Business Suite is the largest application SAP has in terms of customers, said Ken Tsai, VP, SAP Hana product marketing at SAP.

All the hype about Big Data over the past year has succeeded in educating executives in organizations of all sizes across nearly every industry about the unprecedented potential to use analytics to improve operations, sales effectiveness and customer support. However, the hype has also too often mad...

Recently while presenting the findings of a Big Data survey to an executive team, I was a bit taken aback when the CEO stopped me and said, "I'll listen to what you learned from the survey as long as you don't use those two words again -- 'Big Data' -- I've already told my team there will be hell to...

This year's EMC Industry Analyst Summit included numerous highlights familiar to regular IT conference attendees: a self-generated report card on the previous year's activities and a discussion of plans for the year ahead, for example. Few, however, offer the level of access EMC does by holding cand...

EMC has announced it is acquiring Silver Tail Systems, a provider of real-time Web session intelligence and behavioral analysis. When the acquisition is closed, which is expected in the fourth quarter, Silver Tail will be part of EMC's security division, tasked with extending RSA's enterprise securi...

It is that time of year again -- namely, prediction-making season. Gartner is the first out of the gate with its top 10 strategic tech trends for 2013 and a few years beyond. Among its forecasts: dominance of mobile devices; shift to HTML5; growth of the personal cloud; growth of private enterprise ...

Compete has agreed to settle FTC charges that it used its Web-tracking software to collect personal data without disclosing the extent of its information-gathering activities, and failed to honor promises it made to protect the personal data it collected. Under the settlement, Compete must obtain co...

It is difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and consumers, academics, companies, and the government are all aware of this fact. The Affordable Care Act carries many provisions to promote healthy behaviors, in many cases following initiatives already independently implemented by insurance compan...

In commercial IT, "enterprise systems" have long been defined as the technologies that provide large organizations the highest levels of compute performance and critical attributes such as reliability, availability and scalability. But enterprise IT infrastructures have never been about technology a...

Groupon is entering the mobile payments space with its own offering, Groupon Payments. The service, which facilitates credit card transactions, is available to any small business in the U.S.; however, it's offered to Groupon merchants at cheaper rates. Groupon is positioning the service as easier an...

When SAP's five founders launched the company in June 1972, it's unlikely they foresaw where the IT industry would travel in the decades to come. SAP's core business applications, including enterprise resource planning solutions, continue to support tens of thousands of companies globally -- but h...