Tag: Tools

Interview Beth Schultz Editor AllAnalytics.com

Here is an interview with Beth Scultz Editor in Chief, AllAnalytics.com .

Allanalytics.com http://www.allanalytics.com/ is the new online community on Predictive Analytics, and its a bit different in emphasizing quality more than just quantity. Beth is veteran in tech journalism and communities.

Ajay-Describe your journey in technology journalism and communication. What are the other online communities that you have been involved with?

Beth- I’m a longtime IT journalist, having begun my career covering the telecommunications industry at the brink of AT&T’s divestiture — many eons ago. Over the years, I’ve covered the rise of internal corporate networking; the advent of the Internet and creation of the Web for business purposes; the evolution of Web technology for use in building intranets, extranets, and e-commerce sites; the move toward a highly dynamic next-generation IT infrastructure that we now call cloud computing; and development of myriad enterprise applications, including business intelligence and the analytics surrounding them. I have been involved in developing online B2B communities primarily around next-generation enterprise IT infrastructure and applications. In addition, Shawn Hessinger, our community editor, has been involved in myriad Web sites aimed at creating community for small business owners.

 Ajay- Technology geeks get all the money while journalists get a story. Comments please

Beth- Great technology geeks — those being the ones with technology smarts as well as business savvy — do stand to make a lot of money. And some pursue that to all ends (with many entrepreneurs gunning for the acquisition) while others more or less fall into it. Few journalists, at least few tech journalists, have big dollars in mind. The gratification for journalists comes in being able to meet these folks, hear and deliver their stories — as appropriate — and help explain what makes this particular technology geek developing this certain type of product or service worth paying attention to.

 Ajay- Describe what you are trying to achieve with the All Analytics community and how it seeks to differentiate itself with other players in this space.

 Beth- With AllAnaltyics.com, we’re concentrating on creating the go-to site for CXOs, IT professionals, line-of-business managers, and other professionals to share best practices, concrete experiences, and research about data analytics, business intelligence, information optimization, and risk management, among many other topics. We differentiate ourself by featuring excellent editorial content from a top-notch group of bloggers, access to industry experts through weekly chats, ongoing lively and engaging message board discussions, and biweekly debates.

We’re a new property, and clearly in rapid building mode. However, we’ve already secured some of the industry’s most respected BI/analytics experts to participate as bloggers. For example, a small sampling of our current lineup includes the always-intrigueing John Barnes, a science fiction novelist and statistics guru; Sandra Gittlen, a longtime IT journalist with an affinity for BI coverage; Olivia Parr-Rud, an internationally recognized expert in BI and organizational alignment; Tom Redman, a well-known data-quality expert; and Steve Williams, a leading BI strategy consultant. I blog daily as well, and in particular love to share firsthand experiences of how organizations are benefiting from the use of BI, analytics, data warehousing, etc. We’ve featured inside looks at analytics initiatives at companies such as 1-800-Flowers.com, Oberweis Dairy, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, and Thomson Reuters, for example.

In addition, we’ve hosted instant e-chats with Web and social media experts Joe Stanganelli and Pierre DeBois, and this Friday, Aug. 26, at 3 p.m. ET we’ll be hosting an e-chat with Marshall Sponder, Web metrics guru and author of the newly published book, Social Media Analytics: Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics. (Readers interested in participating in the chat do need to fill out a quick registration form, available here http://www.allanalytics.com/register.asp . The chat is available here http://www.allanalytics.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=241039&piddl_msgid=439898#msg_439898 .

Experts participating in our biweekly debate series, called Point/Counterpoint, have broached topics such as BI in the cloud, mobile BI and whether an analytics culture is truly possible to build.

Ajay-  What are some tips you would like to share about writing tech stories to aspiring bloggers.

Beth- I suppose my best advice is this: Don’t write about technology for technology’s sake. Always strive to tell the audience why they should care about a particular technology, product, or service. How might a reader use it to his or her company’s advantage, and what are the potential benefits? Improved productivity, increased revenue, better customer service? Providing anecdotal evidence goes a long way toward delivering that message, as well.

Ajay- What are the other IT world websites that have made a mark on the internet.

Beth- I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to UBM TechWeb sites, including InformationWeek, which has long charted the use of IT within the enterprise; Dark Reading, a great source for folks interested in securing an enterprise’s information assets; and Light Reading, which takes the pulse of the telecom industry.

 Biography- 

Beth Schultz has more than two decades of experience as an IT writer and editor. Most recently, she brought her expertise to bear writing thought-provoking editorial and marketing materials on a variety of technology topics for leading IT publications and industry players. Previously, she oversaw multimedia content development, writing and editing for special feature packages at Network World. Beth has a keen ability to identify business and technology trends, developing expertise through in-depth analysis and early-adopter case studies. Over the years, she has earned more than a dozen national and regional editorial excellence awards for special issues from American Business Media, American Society of Business Press Editors, Folio.net, and others.

 

Ah! The Internet.

On the Internet I am not brown or black or white. I am Anonymous and yet myself. I am free to choose  whatever identity I wish to choose, free to drink from whatever pools of knowledge my local government wishes to forbid. The Internet does not care about how rich or poor I may be. It has ways to track exactly where I am, but it has tools to disguise that as well. On the internet the strongest government, the richest corporation and the deepest pockets can tremble before the bits and bytes of a talented and motivated hacker working from his basement in his parents house.
There are no losers on the Internet: only winners. Except for those who seek to covet and control the uncontrollable- the human desire to seek knowledge beyond the confines of whatever cave they may find themselves borne in.
There are no countries to wage war on the Internet: there is nothing to kill and die for. The Internet allowed a million writers to write and publish without the interference of brokers and intermediaries. It allowed a billion people to download a trillion songs that were locked away in some rich man’s virtual vault. It allowed a dozen countries to overthrow their dictators without wasting a billion worth of goods and treasure.

On the Internet, everyone is equal, free and true to the own nature they choose, not the fate that is chosen by corporation, country or circumstance.
Ah! The Internet- it will set you free.

The best of Google Plus this week

Its been slightly over a month- and I noticed Google Plus stream is now getting to look like my Facebook stream as more of my friends join up. However there is no (share this on Google Plus button still!)

Top Meme’s this week on Google Plus

1) Points of View

Continue reading “The best of Google Plus this week”

Interview Mike Boyarski Jaspersoft

Here is an interview with Mike Boyarski , Director Product Marketing at Jaspersoft

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the largest BI community with over 14 million downloads, nearly 230,000 registered members, representing over 175,000 production deployments, 14,000 customers, across 100 countries.

Ajay- Describe your career in science from Biology to marketing great software.
Mike- I studied Biology with the assumption I’d pursue a career in medicine. It took about 2 weeks during an internship at a Los Angeles hospital to determine I should do something else.  I enjoyed learning about life science, but the whole health care environment was not for me.  I was initially introduced to enterprise-level software while at Applied Materials within their Microcontamination group.  I was able to assist with an internal application used to collect contamination data.  I later joined Oracle to work on an Oracle Forms application used to automate the production of software kits (back when documentation and CDs had to be physically shipped to recognize revenue). This gave me hands on experience with Oracle 7, web application servers, and the software development process.
I then transitioned to product management for various products including application servers, software appliances, and Oracle’s first generation SaaS based software infrastructure. In 2006, with the Siebel and PeopleSoft acquisitions underway, I moved on to Ingres to help re-invigorate their solid yet antiquated technology. This introduced me to commercial open source software and the broader Business Intelligence market.  From Ingres I joined Jaspersoft, one of the first and most popular open source Business Intelligence vendors, serving as head of product marketing since mid 2009.
Ajay- Describe some of the new features in Jaspersoft 4.1 that help differentiate it from the rest of the crowd. What are the exciting product features we can expect from Jaspersoft down the next couple of years.
Mike- Jaspersoft 4.1 was an exciting release for our customers because we were able to extend the latest UI advancements in our ad hoc report designer to the data analysis environment. Now customers can use a unified intuitive web-based interface to perform several powerful and interactive analytic functions across any data source, whether its relational, non-relational, or a Big Data source.
 The reality is that most (roughly 70%) of todays BI adoption is in the form of reports and dashboards. These tools are used to drive and measure an organizations business, however, data analysis presents the most strategic opportunity for companies because it can identify new opportunities, efficiencies, and competitive differentiation.  As more data comes online, the difference between those companies that are successful and those that are not will likely be attributed to their ability to harness data analysis techniques to drive and improve business performance. Thus, with Jaspersoft 4.1, and our improved ad hoc reporting and analysis UI we can effectively address a broader set of BI requirements for organizations of all sizes.
Ajay-  What do you think is a good metric to measure influence of an open source software product – is it revenue or is it number of downloads or number of users. How does Jaspersoft do by these counts.
Mike- History has shown that open source software is successful as a “bottoms up” disrupter within IT or the developer market.  Today, many new software projects and startup ventures are birthed on open source software, often initiated with little to no budget. As the organization achieves success with a particular project, the next initiative tends to be larger and more strategic, often displacing what was historically solved with a proprietary solution. These larger deployments strengthen the technology over time.
Thus, the more proven and battle tested an open source solution is, often measured via downloads, deployments, community size, and community activity, usually equates to its long term success. Linux, Tomcat, and MySQL have plenty of statistics to model this lifecycle. This model is no different for open source BI.
The success to date of Jaspersoft is directly tied to its solid proven technology and the vibrancy of the community.  We proudly and openly claim to have the largest BI community with over 14 million downloads, nearly 230,000 registered members, representing over 175,000 production deployments, 14,000 customers, across 100 countries.  Every day, 30,000 developers are using Jaspersoft to build BI applications.  Behind Excel, its hard to imagine a more widely used BI tool in the market.  Jaspersoft could not reach these kind of numbers with crippled or poorly architected software.
Ajay- What are your plans for leveraging cloud computing, mobile and tablet platforms and for making Jaspersoft more easy and global  to use.

Analytics 2011 Conference

From http://www.sas.com/events/analytics/us/

The Analytics 2011 Conference Series combines the power of SAS’s M2010 Data Mining Conference and F2010 Business Forecasting Conference into one conference covering the latest trends and techniques in the field of analytics. Analytics 2011 Conference Series brings the brightest minds in the field of analytics together with hundreds of analytics practitioners. Join us as these leading conferences change names and locations. At Analytics 2011, you’ll learn through a series of case studies, technical presentations and hands-on training. If you are in the field of analytics, this is one conference you can’t afford to miss.

Conference Details

October 24-25, 2011
Grande Lakes Resort
Orlando, FL

Analytics 2011 topic areas include:

Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors

If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it- Peter Drucker

Here is a RSS feed/website  for all security incidents

http://www.us-cert.gov/current/ and http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/

You can also see http://www.onguardonline.gov/tools/overview.aspx for tools to be secure online.

But the new measuring system is http://cwe.mitre.org/cwss/ to help being secure. It basically creates a score or an anlytical approach for measuring vulnerabilities.

Common Weakness Scoring System (CWSS)

The Common Weakness Scoring System (CWSS) provides a mechanism for scoring weaknesses in a consistent, flexible, open manner while accommodating context for the various business domains. It is a collaborative, community-based effort that is addressing the needs of itsstakeholders across government, academia, and industry. CWSS is a part of the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) project, co-sponsored by the Software Assurance program in the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

CWSS:

  • provides a common framework for prioritizing security errors (“weaknesses”) that are discovered in software applications
  • provides a quantitative measurement of the unfixed weaknesses that are present within a software application
  • can be used by developers to prioritize unfixed weaknesses within their own software
  • in conjunction with the Common Weakness Risk Analysis Framework (CWRAF), can be used by consumers to identify the most important weaknesses for their business domains, in order to inform their acquisition and protection activities as one part of the larger process of achieving software assurance.

and the top 25 errors in software are

http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/index.html

 

Rank Score ID Name
[1] 93.8 CWE-89 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command (‘SQL Injection’)
[2] 83.3 CWE-78 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command (‘OS Command Injection’)
[3] 79.0 CWE-120 Buffer Copy without Checking Size of Input (‘Classic Buffer Overflow’)
[4] 77.7 CWE-79 Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation (‘Cross-site Scripting’)
[5] 76.9 CWE-306 Missing Authentication for Critical Function
[6] 76.8 CWE-862 Missing Authorization
[7] 75.0 CWE-798 Use of Hard-coded Credentials
[8] 75.0 CWE-311 Missing Encryption of Sensitive Data
[9] 74.0 CWE-434 Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type
[10] 73.8 CWE-807 Reliance on Untrusted Inputs in a Security Decision
[11] 73.1 CWE-250 Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
[12] 70.1 CWE-352 Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
[13] 69.3 CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory (‘Path Traversal’)
[14] 68.5 CWE-494 Download of Code Without Integrity Check
[15] 67.8 CWE-863 Incorrect Authorization
[16] 66.0 CWE-829 Inclusion of Functionality from Untrusted Control Sphere
[17] 65.5 CWE-732 Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
[18] 64.6 CWE-676 Use of Potentially Dangerous Function
[19] 64.1 CWE-327 Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
[20] 62.4 CWE-131 Incorrect Calculation of Buffer Size
[21] 61.5 CWE-307 Improper Restriction of Excessive Authentication Attempts
[22] 61.1 CWE-601 URL Redirection to Untrusted Site (‘Open Redirect’)
[23] 61.0 CWE-134 Uncontrolled Format String
[24] 60.3 CWE-190 Integer Overflow or Wraparound
[25] 59.9 CWE-759 Use of a One-Way Hash without a Salt

 

You can use the list at http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/index.html and check your own corporate vulnerabilities. It is better to sweat in cyber peace than bleed in cyber war, huh.