Author: Ajay Ohri

https://linkedin.com/in/ajayohri

More Analytics in the Cloud

Here is a company called www.birst.com which does this- upload data, crunch and share it.

 

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Other softwares include Cloudbase released by www.business.com and available at http://cloudbase.sourceforge.net/

"CloudBase is a data warehouse system for Terabyte and Petabyte scale analytics. It is built on top of Map-Reduce architecture. The current code has been developed to Hadoop‘s map-reduce implementation. CloudBase allows you to query flat log files using ANSI SQL. It comes with JDBC driver so you can use any JDBC database manager application (e.g Squirrel) as front end. CloudBase is developed by Business.com and is released to open source community under GNU General Public License 2.0." 

 

A third product is Vertica , which can be seen here http://www.vertica.com/cloud

 

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The benefits are "

Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud is an on-demand version of Vertica’s blazingly fast, grid-enabled columnar database hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. The pay-as-you-go offering enables companies to create large, high-performance analytic data marts without upfront data center costs and delays.

Built for the Cloud
Vertica is the only cloud-based analytic database with the following innovations, which enable it to manage terabytes of data faster and more reliably than any other cloud database:

  • “Scale-out” grid architecture – handles changing workloads as elastically as the cloud
  • Aggressive data compression – keeps storage costs low
  • Automatic K-Safety – provides replication, failover and recovery in the cloud

New Business Intelligence Possibilities
Vertica for the Cloud completely changes the economics of BI, making it possible to rapidly
initiate a much broader spectrum of analytic projects and businesses:

  • Ad-hoc and short-lived business analytic projects
  • New analytic Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses
  • Vertica Analytic Database proof of concept projects

Benefits of Vertica for the Cloud:

  • Fastest “Time to Terabyte” – Fully provisioned and ready for loading within minutes
  • Fastest performance – 100x to 1000x faster than other cloud databases
  • Runs 24×7 – Automatic K-Safety makes Vertica the only failure-resilient analytic cloud DBMS
  • Lowest startup cost – No upfront hardware, data center or admin overhead. Just pay for database usage until you’re done, then stop paying for it
  • Painless scalability – Scales seamlessly as data volume changes
  • Smallest footprint – Compresses data up to 90% to lower costs and improve performance
  • Proven platform – Hosted by Amazon, within their proven data center

"

 

But if you want to directly start experimenting with the Amazon Ec2 , costs are not verey high. Remember it is a pay as you go system. As an analytics supplier looking to cut costs , the cloud computing paradigm seems the fastest way to do so.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

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Good Data

I have written in the past about efforts by Microsoft ( using SQL Server at http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/cloud/) and the data browser ( at www.kirix.com ).

I have also written about my framework for using R based cloud computing.

Here is something exciting – Its from the founder of NetBeans and its called www.gooddata.com ) . The concept is simple and powerful and the company does have credentials to back it up. Again it’s a free trial so check it out –

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A Program for Terrorists

Unlike other Indian Bloggers, this one is not about the Mumbai attacks. I have stayed in those hotels , including once taking my then pregnant wife on a moon light horse ridden carriage in front of it. This is not about it all –

Here is a fascinating new program for "catching terrorist networks". Its from the Dulles Research Group, which also makes the Base SAS to Java Compiler (see below)

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A Base SAS to Java Compiler

Here is a nice SAS to Java compiler. It basically cuts away at the problem of executing legacy SAS code, SAS training and focusses on executing the tasks in Java thus making them much faster.

It’s available at http://dullesopen.com/

And its free for personal use.And academic use.

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I quote from the website "

Carolina Benefits

Converting Base SAS® to Java with Carolina provides two main benefits to enterprises:

  • Savings on license fees. Carolina costs about 70% less than SAS.
  • Performance gains. Carolina-converted code runs significantly faster than the native SAS program.

Additional Benefits

  • Greater flexibility. Java is an industry-standard environment that runs on all platforms. It is much easier to support than the legacy SAS environment it replaces.
  • Better integration. Carolina, as a Java application, supports web services through true J2EE integration.
  • Flawless automated conversion. Eliminate time-consuming, error-prone manual conversion.
  • Simpler contracts. Carolina is licensed in a simple, straightforward fashion.
  • Reduced training costs. Carolina-converted programs can be understood by analysts without training in SAS, and SAS-trained analysts don’t need to learn a new programming language."

Some Business Analytics Questions

My presentation at the Timesgroup office went well. I have uploaded a copy on to the Google Docs and it can be viewed here http://docs.google.com/Presentation?docid=dcvss358_324cfhpg7cv&hl=en

Some questions that came out of the discussion were –

 

1) Businesses are aligned in types of products that can be sold ? 

What are the 5 top segments of customers ( irrespective of product) that come to your website

2) Cross Sell- What are the top 10 products ( irrespective of whether you own them or not) that can be sold to your customer database

3) Who are the top dis satisfied customers of your competitors ?

4) Businesses change every year . How many times are reporting systems over hauled completely to reflect the change – say once in six months?

5) How many employees go in for self funded  training once a year ?

Overall , a great discussion and hopefully it helps you answer the above questions too.