20 in 2012 and TDWI
Having been a Business Intelligence analyst and later joining the industry for close to the last decade, I was taken with the elegance and innovative approach of Birst when I first stumbled across it–so much so that I eventually joined Birst when the opportunity arose. Due to this personal experience, I am excited to share that Birst was among the ‘Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2012’ by CIO magazine last ... More >
Posted in Product
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Healthcare Forecast: Increasing clouds with a chance of dramatic improvement
If ever there was an application designed for cloud computing, it is healthcare. I’m convinced that any attempt – from free enterprise to government-managed – that has a chance of actually fixing our current healthcare crisis will have to go through the cloud.
In the process the hospitals, insurance companies, entrepreneurs and government bureaucrats will discover that the cloud will provide them with some im ... More >
Posted in Brad's Blog
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Data Here, Data There, Data Data Everywhere
As users, we are creating hundreds of terabytes of data coming from every possible digital source. If you’ve been following big data, you probably have heard of the 3 “V’s” that it is becoming associated with:
Volume – big data volume is ‘big’; terabytes possibly even petabytes of information
Velocity – big data value is in its real-time or near real-time nature
Variety – big data extends beyond ... More >
Going to College — What a Concept
If you’ve been carefully reading the news – or you’ve got a teenaged child – then you know that a crisis is emerging in American higher education. And if many of the colleges and universities in this country hope to survive the bursting of this ‘bubble’, then they had better start looking now to the Cloud.
It has become so familiar in our daily lives that it is easy to forget that the one asset the Unit ... More >
Posted in Brad's Blog
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Is there a Silver Lining in the Apple iCloud?
The current forecast for the Apple iCloud is Hazy with few signs of clearing.
You may not have heard, or perhaps you don’t remember, Apple’s announcement last June that it would now provide MacBook, iPhone and iPad users with access to a cloud-based service to store their files and apps. But even if you do know about iCloud, the nature of its introduction and its roll-out over the last six months may have left ... More >
Posted in Brad's Blog
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2012: The March to In-Memory
The evolution of Business Intelligence (BI), reporting and analytics has seen dramatic changes in recent years. First BI users were familiar with printed, mainframe reports which saw progression into spreadsheet reports and data warehousing cubes for analysis. In the 90’s as services-based architecture became popular, static reports went through a metamorphosis into ad-hoc reporting and onset of data visualizatio ... More >
Posted in General Interest
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Software PACMAN
If you follow the world of enterprise software, you’ve no doubt noticed that the last couple months have been a time of frenzied acquisition of little fish by big fish. IBM bought DemandTech for $440 million, Oracle purchased RightNow Technologies for $1.4 billion, and in the biggest deal of all, SAP snapped up SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. These moves harken back to a similar burst of acquisitions by these sa ... More >
Posted in Brad's Blog
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Ah, Suite Mediocrity . . .
When I was boy, if your parents wanted to buy a stereo music system to play the family LPs, they had basically two choices: component or console. And they were very different indeed.
Component stereo systems looked a lot like modern stereos. That is, you purchased individual parts of the music system – turntable, speakers, amplifier, tuner, perhaps a pre-amp – typically buying the best component from the top ma ... More >
Posted in Brad's Blog
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Sneaking a Peek into Birst’s Secret Sauce
A cool new capability that is now shipping with Birst 5 is our visual dataflow framework. This drag and drop GUI gives administrators a way to define and visualize the relationships of their multi-dimensional data. It’s the way he or she would manage their different data sources and do the logical modelling required for advanced analytics. Through it, an administrator can quickly and easily build and then ... More >
Posted in News & Events, Video
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How to Lose Control Appropriately
In the tech world, as with the rest of the business world, we use terms like “attack”, “capture”, and “defense” and other martial terms to describe the endless challenge of gaining customers, hanging on to them over time, and growing them into ever-more profitable sources of revenue.
Indeed, at first glance, almost everything in business seems to be about the idea of control. That is, you control your e ... More >
Posted in Brad's Blog, Forbes.com
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