Jeff Heer of Stanford University and Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland have co-authored a wonderful new paper titled “Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis.” With so much emphasis today on the visualizations themselves, Jeff and Ben are encouraging us to also attend to the interactions with those visualizations that are required for effective analysis. Data exploration and sensemaking (a.k.a., exploratory data analysis) requires constant and fluid movement from one view to the next, rapidly changing how we’re viewing the data to pursue each new question that arises. Interactions are required to alter the view, and it’s important that those interactions be quick and easy, otherwise our minds will be distracted from the flow of analysis.

In this paper, a taxonomy of 12 interactions, organized into three categories, is proposed:

Jeff and Ben are two of the smartest, most articulate, and most productive researchers in the field of information visualization. This paper is well worth your time. Read it and then consider how well the data analysis tools that you currently use support these interactions.

Take care,

Article source: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1175

When Square launched a few years ago, it came to market with a very compelling value proposition: Give everyone the chance to process credit card transactions. It turns out that’s become a pretty useful tool for small businesses and individual merchants — Square is now processing about $4 billion in payments per year.

But that was the easy part. Now Square is giving small vendors the tools to make intelligent decisions with the same sort of inventory management, sales data and analytics their larger competitors have. And it’s got the potential to make an even greater impact than the initial payment processing piece had made.

Over the last several decades, we’ve seen the wholesale destruction of mom-and-pop shops, as small businesses have seen customers flee and take their business to larger retail chains. But it’s not just that they couldn’t compete on price — it’s that they were unable to compete on inventory management. Things cost more not just because small businesses didn’t have the scale to purchase at the same volume as larger competitors, but also because for many of them, inventory management was expensive and inefficient.

With the launch of Square Register, the startup is looking to change all that. It’s seeking to democratize business intelligence, allowing anyone to set up a point-of-sale offering without having to make a huge upfront investment. It’s creating a more level playing field for the little guy, for the mom-and-pop shop, for those who otherwise couldn’t afford the kind of business analytics the big retail chains took for granted.

Sure, it’s easy to view Square’s latest product as just an easy way for it to sink its claws deeper into potential customers, especially as competition heats up in the payments space. The big guys like Mastercard, Visa and American Express aren’t just sitting idly by while Square takes a chunk out of their processing business — they’re aggressively pushing near-field communications and building their own payment apps in response.

But I think there’s something else going on here. Watch Jack Dorsey’s interview with Om from last year’s GigaOM Roadmap. This is a guy who loves the local artisanal coffee shop (Sightglass Coffee), who roots for small businesses like Earnest Sewn jeans that build quality products. He really wants to give those businesses the tools to make them work and succeed.

“Something like Square allows anyone who wants to start a business to start it immediately and get information about how the business is doing so that they can grow it,” Dorsey said on stage last year. Looking at Square Register, you can actually see that vision in action.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competition

Article source: http://gigaom.com/2012/03/04/square-register/

Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, 5 March 2012

Ordina and the Municipality of Amsterdam won the European Software Excellence Award in the category Business Intelligence in Berlin. Ordina and the municipality were being nominated as a finalist in this category a few weeks ago, for an open source project conducted for a large Dutch municipality. This project consisted of an integrated open source solution that collects financial and management information from a variety of different systems. The solution offers public officials complete insight into the progress, status of budgets and other management information of all large-scale projects for the Physical Planning Department (known as `Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening` in the Netherlands). Since then, other municipal departments have also adopted the software. The Municipality of Amsterdam has started restructuring all of their own IT systems. This Award demonstrates that the first successes are being achieved. Ordina collaborated with JasperSoft, supplier of Open Source Business Intelligence solutions, on this project.

“The finalists all had projects of an excellent calibre. Yet Ordina`s project stood out from the rest in terms of the solution`s high added value for the client, the Municipality of Amsterdam”, according to John Chapman, Editorial Director of IT Europa, organiser of the European Software Excellence Awards.

The Municipality of Amsterdam`s Physical Planning Department Director Hans Tijl is the contract principal. “These uncertain times certainly call for a financial finger on the pulse at all times, being able to look far into the future and to correct the course of a project immediately when this is called for. This product gives us up-to-date insights into costs and returns. The beauty of an open source product is also that it is future proof per definition, because it will work with the existing and future financial systems of the Concern Amsterdam.” Tijl is critically enthusiastic about the use of IT: “I have never been a fanatical open source proponent. An organisation is led with facts and results, not with ideologies. In conjunction with Ordina, we selected proven open source, with transparency, also in the interaction with existing and future closed applications and systems. It is great that our colleagues will also be able to use it from now on.”

“The fact that we were named the winners of the Business Intelligence award, by an independent party such as IT Europa, is a confirmation of the implementation`s success,” says Joris Höppener, Director of the Business Solutions division at Ordina. “The judges evaluate the success of the implementation, the solution`s level of innovation and the value added to the client. We scored high on all of these aspects thanks to the level of cooperation between the client and the service providers. The excellent cooperation between Ordina, Jaspersoft and the municipality enabled us to implement Jaspersoft`s innovative open source solution successfully within the organisation. This implementation gives over 300 users a complete overview of the status of their projects at a single glance. This improves the overall control of the municipality`s large projects and ensures a more effective way of working. The Award`s judges clearly recognised this too and we are very proud of that.”

IT Europa organises the European Software Excellence Awards annually. The organisation uses the Awards to highlight the best solutions in the market. These solutions stand out because of their high degree of applicability within the client organisation or the unique cooperation between the supplier and the client or because the solution added such significant value to the client organisation. The Awards are not intended for standard products.

 # # #

  
About Ordina
Ordina implements strategy in business processes and IT. We create and build solutions for a sustainable digital world. Collaborating with our clients, partners and suppliers brings us the best solutions. We are organised into specialised divisions for consulting, solutions and IT. We are active throughout the Benelux, offering (reusable) solutions and knowledge to the financial services, government and healthcare markets as well as a few specific segments within the industry market. Ordina N.V. was incorporated in 1973 and its shares are quoted on Amsterdam`s Euronext Stock Exchange, where they are included in the Midkap Index. In 2011, Ordina generated revenue in excess of 426 million Euros with over 3.000 employees.

MORE INFORMATION:
Ordina N.V.
Sabine Steen-Lakerveld, PR Manager / Corporate Communications Consultant
Tel: +31(0)30 663 7878
Sabine.Steen-Lakerveld@ordina.nl
www.ordina.com

In case of any discrepancies, the original Dutch version prevails.

5-3-2012 Press Release – Ordina and Municipality of Amsterdam win BI

The owner of this announcement warrants that:
(i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and
(ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the
information contained therein.

Source: Ordina via Thomson Reuters ONE
HUG#1591167

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ordina-municipality-amsterdam-win-business-070304608.html

Yves, you recently announced Talend Open Studio for Big Data, and the world is really energized about big data. Could you tell us if this is Talend’s first step into the world of “big data”?

Yves de Montcheuil: It’s not our first step into the world of big data. Talend has been working with big data even before it was called big data. We have had connectivity for Hadoop. We have had the ability to load data, to process data within Hadoop for over two years. We’ve been partners with the early vendors in the Hadoop space – for example, Cloudera. We’ve been present at many of the Hadoop events in the past few years. So clearly, Talend is not a new entrant into the big data space. What we are doing with Talend Open Studio for Big Data is that we are putting all of our big data capabilities into the same product. That’s, of course, data integration, which is obviously a key element, but also other features such as data quality and cleansing apply to big data – the same kind of rules and filters that you would apply to conventional data. 

When I look at the big data world, we hear a lot about Hadoop. What benefits does Talend Open Studio for Big Data bring to the users of Hadoop?   

Yves de Montcheuil: The goal of Talend Open Studio for Big Data is to democratize the deployment of Hadoop to leverage big data. Talend was originally founded on the promise of democratizing integration, and we’ve been extremely successful at that, especially when it comes to integrating databases, applications, cloud, SaaS, etc. Hadoop introduces very high complexity to what you need to design in order to extract value – to extract information – out of that massive amount of data. Typically it would take something akin to a PhD in MapReduce, and I don’t think that PhD has been invented yet. What we are offering with Talend Open Studio for Big Data is the ability to very easily design big data integration and big data quality jobs, connect to sources, connect to targets, get data into Hadoop, process data into Hadoop. In other words, not only integrate it with the rest of the enterprise IT stack – you might want to get data out of Oracle or Salesforce.com, and get the resulting data into Teradata or into QlikView – but also prepare the data, process it directly inside Hadoop. Don’t use Hadoop only as a place to store information, but also use it for what it is: an engine, an extremely powerful and scalable engine to process information. Again, without having to write the MapReduce code, we can abstract those transformations through our graphical interface with simple drag and drop of components, and the underlying code is generated automatically.

Talend Open Studio for Big Data is fully integrated with the Apache Hadoop stack. It’s available under an Apache license, which makes it compatible at the license level with the Hadoop products.

We also announced recently a partnership with Hortonworks, one of the leading providers of Hadoop distributions – the Hortonworks Data Platform. Talend Open Studio for Big Data is now embedded into the Hortonworks Data Platform, and is clearly the reference tool for integrating, for moving and for transforming big data into Hadoop.

Talend’s roots are open source, and big data’s roots are in open source too. It would seem to me that you would have an edge over the competition that does not have your open source roots. Would you agree with that?

Yves de Montcheuil: It’s big data without the big bucks. You want to be able to get the benefits of big data without having to put millions of dollars on the table. And, frankly, a lot of companies have been doing big data for quite some time, but they have been doing it with conventional technologies. You know you can process massive amounts of data with, for example, a Teradata data warehouse, which is an extremely powerful technology, but also an expensive solution. Hadoop changes the game. It brings big data to the masses, and that’s thanks to the open source nature of Hadoop.

Beyond big data integration, is there a requirement for big data quality?

Yves de Montcheuil: There is absolutely a requirement for big data quality. If you are just processing and moving big data without introducing the quality dimension into it, you’re just shoveling heaps of garbage around. So what you want to do is cleanse and enrich the data the same way you would do it for small data or conventional data. I think today anybody who does business intelligence or data warehousing clearly understands the requirement of ensuring the quality of the data. The same holds true for big data except that it’s to the power of ten – at least! – because the data sets are much larger and more complex. If you don’t apply proper data quality, proper data hygiene, to your big data, you’re going to end up with a much bigger problem than what you would encounter in the conventional data world.

In order to do big data quality, one avenue that we are taking is to leverage Hadoop for CPU-intensive data quality functions. Features such as matching, deduplication, and linking of records can consume enormous amounts of resources. Because MapReduce is such a scalable architecture, we have taken the approach of generating Hadoop code in order to perform the data quality functions right inside of Hadoop.

That’s an ingenious way to do it. They always say “Do it at the source,” and you can’t do it any closer to the source than by doing it in Hadoop.

Yves de Montcheuil: It’s doing it wherever it makes the most sense. It can be the source, it can be close to the target or it can be an intermediate engine. The key is to process the data where you have the ability to process it the best.

Good point. Can you share with us some use cases for big data integration?

Yves de Montcheuil: Some of our customers are doing very interesting things with big data. One that comes to mind is a telco company. They’ve been doing traditional data warehousing and business intelligence  for a long time. In addition to those conventional sources that are coming from their customer applications, from their billing systems, etc., they are now doing sentiment analysis and monitoring social media – Twitter, Facebook – for people who are talking about them and their services. They are aggregating this information using Hadoop technology alongside a data warehouse that resides in one of the traditional data warehousing platforms. It’s really a very interesting use case where big data actually complements the traditional data warehouse that is in place.

Another use case we are encountering is when Hadoop is used essentially as an auxiliary ETL engine, but one that is on steroids. You have this big scale-out architecture that’s your Hadoop cluster, which gives you the ability to process very large amounts of data, aggregate it, and perform mathematical or statistical calculations on those records. By using Hadoop as the ETL engine that will then load the traditional data warehouse, some of our customers are actually decreasing, by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, the amount of time it takes to process  the raw data and load the data warehouse. They are able to get much closer to real-time data warehousing than they were before.

That’s excellent. Yves, thank you for bringing our readers up to speed on your big data initiatives.

• Ron Powell
  
  Ron has an extensive technology background in business intelligence, analytics and data warehousing. In 2005, Ron founded the BeyeNETWORK, which was acquired by Tech Target in 2010.  Now an associate publisher at TechTarget, Ron continues to lead the BeyeNETWORK, providing editorial direction and supporting the sales team. Prior to the founding of the BeyeNETWORK, Ron was cofounder, publisher and editorial director of DM Review (now Information Management). Ron also has a wealth of consulting expertise in business intelligence, business management and marketing.

Recent articles by Ron Powell

• Data Replication for Improved BI and Analytics: A Spotlight QA with Matt Benati of Attunity
• Creating a Big Data Platform: A QA with Billy Bosworth of DataStax
• Data Virtualization Now Mainstream: A QA Spotlight with Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo
• Scalable Predictive Analytics for Big Data: A QA Spotlight with Clint Johnson of Alpine Data

Article source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/15911

Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, 5 March 2012

Ordina and the Municipality of Amsterdam won the European Software Excellence Award in the category Business Intelligence in Berlin. Ordina and the municipality were being nominated as a finalist in this category a few weeks ago, for an open source project conducted for a large Dutch municipality. This project consisted of an integrated open source solution that collects financial and management information from a variety of different systems. The solution offers public officials complete insight into the progress, status of budgets and other management information of all large-scale projects for the Physical Planning Department (known as ‘Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening’ in the Netherlands). Since then, other municipal departments have also adopted the software. The Municipality of Amsterdam has started restructuring all of their own IT systems. This Award demonstrates that the first successes are being achieved. Ordina collaborated with JasperSoft, supplier of Open Source Business Intelligence solutions, on this project.

“The finalists all had projects of an excellent calibre. Yet Ordina’s project stood out from the rest in terms of the solution’s high added value for the client, the Municipality of Amsterdam”, according to John Chapman, Editorial Director of IT Europa, organiser of the European Software Excellence Awards.

The Municipality of Amsterdam’s Physical Planning Department Director Hans Tijl is the contract principal. “These uncertain times certainly call for a financial finger on the pulse at all times, being able to look far into the future and to correct the course of a project immediately when this is called for. This product gives us up-to-date insights into costs and returns. The beauty of an open source product is also that it is future proof per definition, because it will work with the existing and future financial systems of the Concern Amsterdam.” Tijl is critically enthusiastic about the use of IT: “I have never been a fanatical open source proponent. An organisation is led with facts and results, not with ideologies. In conjunction with Ordina, we selected proven open source, with transparency, also in the interaction with existing and future closed applications and systems. It is great that our colleagues will also be able to use it from now on.”

“The fact that we were named the winners of the Business Intelligence award, by an independent party such as IT Europa, is a confirmation of the implementation’s success,” says Joris Höppener, Director of the Business Solutions division at Ordina. “The judges evaluate the success of the implementation, the solution’s level of innovation and the value added to the client. We scored high on all of these aspects thanks to the level of cooperation between the client and the service providers. The excellent cooperation between Ordina, Jaspersoft and the municipality enabled us to implement Jaspersoft’s innovative open source solution successfully within the organisation. This implementation gives over 300 users a complete overview of the status of their projects at a single glance. This improves the overall control of the municipality’s large projects and ensures a more effective way of working. The Award’s judges clearly recognised this too and we are very proud of that.”

IT Europa organises the European Software Excellence Awards annually. The organisation uses the Awards to highlight the best solutions in the market. These solutions stand out because of their high degree of applicability within the client organisation or the unique cooperation between the supplier and the client or because the solution added such significant value to the client organisation. The Awards are not intended for standard products.

 # # #

  
About Ordina
Ordina implements strategy in business processes and IT. We create and build solutions for a sustainable digital world. Collaborating with our clients, partners and suppliers brings us the best solutions. We are organised into specialised divisions for consulting, solutions and IT. We are active throughout the Benelux, offering (reusable) solutions and knowledge to the financial services, government and healthcare markets as well as a few specific segments within the industry market. Ordina N.V. was incorporated in 1973 and its shares are quoted on Amsterdam’s Euronext Stock Exchange, where they are included in the Midkap Index. In 2011, Ordina generated revenue in excess of 426 million Euros with over 3.000 employees.

MORE INFORMATION:
Ordina N.V.
Sabine Steen-Lakerveld, PR Manager / Corporate Communications Consultant
Tel: +31(0)30 663 7878
Sabine.Steen-Lakerveld@ordina.nl
www.ordina.com

In case of any discrepancies, the original Dutch version prevails.

The owner of this announcement warrants that:
(i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and
(ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the
information contained therein.

Source: Ordina via Thomson Reuters ONE

Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/05/idUS57933+05-Mar-2012+HUG20120305