Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

How they stack up: IDC on Business Analytics

So here is intelligent enterprise on the latest IDC rankings on Business Intelligence and Business Analytics vendors. If you ever wondered how big the bog boys were- read it at

Citation:

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/info_centers/ent_dev/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=QL4IYMWB1MSIHQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN?articleID=219401120

In 2008, Oracle led the overall market, followed in order by SAP, IBM, SAS and Microsoft, the report said. Rounding out the top 10 were Teradata, Fair Isaac, Informatica, Infor and MicroStrategy, respectively

and

IDC divides the business analytics software market into four primary segments: analytic applications, business intelligence tools, data warehousing platform software and spatial information analytics tools.

and

Fourth-place SAS’ broad portfolio spans all business analytics market segments and is exclusively dedicated to this market. “The company leads in the advanced analytics tools segment and is within the top two vendors in two other market segments,”IDC said.

It’s a brilliant analysis and survey. IDC and Intelligent Enterprise- thanks a tonne for letting us know.

OT: How would you fix the economy

The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?”

I think this guy nailed it!

Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ‘s economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy Continue reading “OT: How would you fix the economy”

Decisionstats| Miscellaneous Part 5

If you think that adding a seperate category for poetry and humourous articles is too much, well it seems the most popular articles came from this section., The poemon Michael Jackson continues to be all time 1, in terms of number of page views (I had hoped one of the interviews would be number 1), and the breakthrough article on Not using R is even quoted in Australia in a university course on data mining. lol!

1) http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/26/tribute-to-michael-jackson/

Poem on MJ. Tribute. May he R.I.P.

2) Top Ten Reasons R language is bad for you. Satire and tongue firmly Continue reading “Decisionstats| Miscellaneous Part 5”

Decisionstats on Social Media| Part 4

Here are some of the social media articles that became popular This one was tough as I have written on many twitter applications, Linkedin Apps etc only to find a new application after a few months. But change is the nature of the game especially if you want to stay online.

1) Spreading content on social media
http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/05/25/spreading-content-using-social-media/

My philosophy is stuff that you do not need to keep secret, should be shared with as wide as audience as possible. For this reason, I prefer that I meet the reading audience half way, on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter rather than play the same old come to my website if you want to read it game. If you love your Continue reading “Decisionstats on Social Media| Part 4”

Making Government Transparent Using R

Here is a terrific interview on O’Reilley Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html

It actually talks of using open source statistics like R to make Government more transparent- like analyzing waste.

Some interesting extracts- like I didnt know S is being maintained by SAS.( I thought Tibco had S Plus)

Citation-http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html

James Turner: So switching gears, the other thing you’re talking about and a big part of your professional life is the R language. Now I will confess that like Erlang, R is something that is on my radar and I see and I look at it and I say, “Okay. When am I ever going to use it?” I mean Erlang is used some places, but R I guess has a very nichey type of audience, doesn’t it?

Danese Cooper: You know, interestingly enough that’s changing. I think that’s been true. R has been in production or in development, let’s say, for the last 20 years. It is patterned after the S language, which was developed in the ’60s at Bell Labs around the same time that UNIX and C were being developed. And it was S for statistics, right? R is sort of a, “If we had known then what we know now” version of S. They’ve been working on it for 20 years in an academic setting. So it has been very slow to grow. But just in the last couple of years, it’s really gotten to a place where it’s ready for enterprise use. And just this year, the people that maintain S, a company called SAS, S-a-s, in South America, south of this country, have announced that they’re going to have to support R, like it’s that widely used now, particularly in schools.

Danese Cooper works for Revolution COmputing that creates a wonderful and professional version of R called Revolution R – some of the work on parallelization and enabling 64 bit Windows R is great. Danese is also a solid open source credentials person having worked with the Board and also with Apache. O Reilley Media’s work in open source conferences is terrific as well.

That apart, the great stuff is in the rest of this must read interview which is available athttp://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html

Experimental Ad AuDio-Video

As an experiment I will be putting Random Images /U Tube songs in the next 7 posts/ post this week. This would be viewable only by reaching my site and not the RSS ( now restored to full rather than summary).

Let me know if the server hangs ( sigh!!) or if you find them distracting.

or if you know a better song.

So what happened to S Plus

Splus – The corporate version of S ( the predecessor of R) is still being marketed by Tibco corporation- again rumoured to be an acquisition target of  (???)

  • SAS ( who have desired R like capabilties especially in their IML  product to be released soon
  • SAP who lost out to IBM in the SPSS acquisition
  • Oracle
  • Microsoft
  • Rogue Wave (acquirer of Visual Numerics)
  • etc etc.

Anyways S Plus is still alive and kicking-

“The S language and the S+ application have been critical to our ability to manage big data objects intrinsic to wind analytics and wind energy development,” said Brad Horn, Director of Wind Analytics at NextEra Energy.  “We credit our long-term interface and Spotfire consulting with unlocking new ideas and sources of value.  Joint dialogue on configuration alternatives and our recent efforts to restructure legacy code is allowing us to transition from simple interactive use of S+ to a customized S+ configuration with integrated batch processing, server load balancing, and parallel processing.  S+ has a central role in supporting internal decisions and our group emphasis on scale, speed, and quality.”

http://spotfire.tibco.com/news/press-releases/2009/2_17_2009.aspx

  • Wavelets, Spatial Stats, EnvironmentalStats: Apply statistics for advanced analysis of signal and image data, spatially correlated data, and environmental data.
  • Resampling: Apply resampling techniques, such as bootstrap and permutation tests, to enable the use of standard statistics on smaller data sets.
  • Association Rules: Uncover relationships between variables in large data sets, most commonly to detect purchase patterns (Market Basket Analysis), or in many other areas like web site usage analysis.
  • Recode Values: Easily handle and prepare data from multiple sources by changing the values in a column to a new value.

    • Deployment and Integration:

    • Spotfire Integration: Read and write Spotfire Text Data files, and leverage examples of using Spotfire Professional to visualize, explore and share model results.
    • Custom Java & C++ nodes: Extend Spotfire Miner by writing custom nodes in Java and C++.
    • Remote Script Execution: Execute S+ scripts remotely on S+ Server to offload and distribute intensive jobs.
    • Global Worksheet Parameters: Make workflows more flexible and reusable to interactive and batch applications.
    • FlexBayes: Create more realistic models, provide a natural way to address missing data, and take advantage of prior analysis.

    Data Access and Preparation:

    • New Data File Types: Unlock more data sources by reading new formats including Spotfire Text Data, Microsoft Excel 2007, Microsoft Access 2007, and Matlab 7.
    • JDBC Access: Access new data sources for analysis with data import and export via the sjdbc library in Spotfire S+ 8.1.

    Citation:

    http://spotfire.tibco.com/Products/S-Plus-Overview.aspx

    http://spotfire.tibco.com/Products/Whatsnew-Splus.aspx