Chuck's Blog

Creating New Capabilities With An Analytics Lab

There are always fascinating discussions going on in EMC's executive briefing centers. 

Sure, there's plenty of traditional bread-and-butter updates: virtualization, security, cloud, backup, storage et. al.

But, more frequently these days, we get customers and partners who put some interesting challenges in front of us, and encourage us to be our very creative best.

And, from those stimulating brainstorming sessions, we frequently come up with repeatable patterns to new opportunities that are customers are encountering.

Such is the case with the concept of an analytics lab. 

And I think we'll be seeing more of these before long.

Should Information Be On The Balance Sheet?

This painfully viral meme comes to you courtesy of none other than James Governor of RedMonk Consulting, perhaps better known as @monkchips.

He infected me badly at the recent EMC megalaunch event in London.  The words escaped his lips, and I had to go think about it -- a lot.

And maybe you should, to.

Community Tools For The New Data Scientist

A seriously cool announcement from the EMC Greenplum folks -- a new "Community Edition" of their powerful database, as well as related open-source analytical power tools to put all that big data to work. 

All free.

I had a serious fling with analytics a long time ago.  Maybe it's time to rekindle that old flame :-)

Are You Ready For Big Data?

Yet another concept starting to pop up ever more frequently in day-to-day conversations.  

Although no formal definition likely exists, my working definition seems to be adequate for the time being: the act of creating new value through harnessing enormous amounts of information.

Yes, though the definitional net is quite large – and many fish are caught as a result – the core thought is the same: big data means that increasingly enormous amounts of data are seen as an inherently good thing vs. an evil to be avoided.

Looking Ahead To 2011

Yep, it's that time of year when pundits and wannabe pundits start making their prognostications about the year ahead.

Since I'm in the latter class (wannabe pundit) part of me feels obligated to offer up my somewhat unique and biased views.  In some sense, you can see this as a preview of many of the themes that I'll be inevitably exploring during 2011.

EMC To Acquire Greenplum

Today, EMC announced its intention to acquire Greenplum -- a successful provider of data warehouse and business intelligence database software.

And there’s a lot to talk about as a result …

The Coming Revolution In Business Analytics

Sometimes, so many pieces seem to line up, I feel obligated to make a call and declare "big changes are coming".

Such is the case with a topic I've come to call business analytics.  Other people might call it decision support, data warehousing, data marts, or perhaps something else.

At its highest level, it's using analytic results to make better business decisions. 

And I think it's a topic that many of us will be drawn into at one level or another -- if we're not already.