Robert Eve

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offer applications and resources at an attractive, pay-as-you-go price, they also create silos of data that are difficult to access by your analytics and BI solutions. Likewise, Big Data offers new storage techniques, processing capabilities and analytic opportunities.  But traditional analytics and BI solutions are typically built assuming relational, SQL-based sources. These often struggle when trying to deliver value from these new No-SQL sources. Cloud and Big Data Silos Add Value to Analytics and BI Analytics and BI opportunities today are abundant and can significantly add value to a business. According to the Professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT: "Companies that inject big data and analytics into their operations show productivity rates an... (more)

What to Do About the Data Silo Challenge

Organizations today understand that better access to information assets can improve their bottom-line. But they struggle with the variety of enterprise, cloud and big data sources, and all their associated access mechanisms, syntax, security, etc.  Further, few data sources are structured properly for business user or application consumption, let alone reuse.  And often the data is incomplete or duplicated. Data Abstraction Addresses These Challenges Data abstraction overcomes data source to data consumer incompatibility by transforming data from its native structure and syntax i... (more)

Big Data: So What! That’s Why You Virtualize

Big Data!  Yes it's BIG! The volume is BIG!  The variety is BIG!  The velocity is BIG! And hopefully the business value is BIG! New Opportunities Bring New Ways to Leverage Proven Technology There is no shortage of media articles, analyst reports, tradeshows, blogs and other source of Big Data technology insight and advice. But it strikes me that in our search to be on the leading edge, we may be overlooking some great existing technology. In fact, some technology, for example data virtualization, is even more useful in a Big Data world. What Is Data Virtualization? Data virtualiz... (more)

CIOs' Top Priority: Analytics and BI

Whether as a driver for growth, a means to attract and retain customers, or a way to drive innovation and reduce costs, the business value of analytics and business intelligence has never been higher. Gartner's Amplifying the Enterprise: The 2012 CIO Agenda as well as IBM's Global CIO Study 2011 confirm this point, with analytics and BI setting atop CIO's technology priorities in both reports. Data Integration Is the Biggest Bottleneck Providing analytics and BI solutions with the data required has always been difficult, with data integration long considered the biggest bottleneck ... (more)

Data Virtualization at Pfizer: A Case Study

Data Virtualization: Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility is the first book published on the topic of data virtualization. Along with an overview of data virtualization and its advantages, it presents ten case studies of organizations that have adopted data virtualization to significantly improve business decision making, decrease time-to-solution and reduce costs. This article describes data virtualization adoption at one of the enterprises profiled, Pfizer Inc. Organization Background Pfizer Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company that develops, manu... (more)