The potential of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) is irresistible. Cloud represents the backbone for any data initiative, and then AI technologies can be used to derive key insights for both greater business intelligence and topline revenue. Yet AI is only as good as the data strategy upon which it sits.

At the AI & Big Data Expo in Amsterdam today, delegates were able to see that the proof of the pudding was in the eating through NetApp's cloud and data fabric...

• Improving revenues using BI is now the most popular objective enterprises are pursuing in 2019
• Reporting, dashboards, data integration, advanced visualisation, and end-user self-service are the most strategic BI initiatives underway in enterprises today
• Operations, executive management, finance, and sales are primarily driving business intelligence (BI) adoption throughout enterprises today
• Tech companies’ operations and sales teams are the most effective at driving BI adoption across industries surveyed, with advertising driving BI adoption across marketing

These...

Note: The most common request from this blogs’ readers is how to further their careers in analytics, cloud computing, data science, and machine learning. I’ve invited Alyssa Columbus, a data scientist at Pacific Life, to share her insights and lessons learned on breaking into the field of data science and launching a career there. The following guest post is authored by her.

Earning a...

Late last week, Google announced its intention to acquire business intelligence platform Looker for $2.6 billion (£2.05bn) in an all-cash transaction, with Looker joining Google Cloud upon the acquisition’s close.

For Google Cloud – whose bill is chump change compared to what

Having worked in the cloud computing arena for approaching 14 years I have seen many changes in technology, strategy and opinion of clients in their views to cloud technology platforms and solutions. 

Attitudes to cloud adoption have changed, going through many phases from the ‘we’ll never go cloud’ to ‘we’ll use it in simple non...

The Human Genome Project, that was declared complete in 2003, took over a decade to run, costing billions of dollars. Using today’s software, the same data analysis can be accomplished in just 26 hours.  

Research has thrived from the rapid growth in computational power. With this, comes increased...

Meet Unravel Data. The California-based big data software provider has secured $35 million (£27.1m) in a series C funding round – with the aim of revamping the application performance management (APM) space.

The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Harmony Partners, as well as existing investors Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital, and M12, formerly Microsoft Ventures.

Smart data is generated by filtering out the noise from big data that's generated by media, business transactions, Internet of Things (IoT), and data exhausts from online activity. Smart data can uncover valuable commercial insights, by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data analytics.

Furthermore, vast amounts of unstructured big data can be converted into smart data using enhanced data analytics tools that utilise artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)...

• An all-time high 48% of organisations say cloud BI is either “critical” or “very important” to their operations in 2019
• Marketing and sales place the greatest importance on cloud BI in 2019
• Small organisations of 100 employees or fewer are the most enthusiastic, perennial adopters and supporters of cloud BI
• The most preferred cloud BI providers are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

These and other insights are from Dresner Advisory Services’ 

Over the past year, I’ve had the good fortune of sitting down with leading enterprises to speak with CIOs, enterprise architects, database engineering leaders, and more. Many of these discussions centred on the evolving world of business applications and databases and the challenges of digital transformation initiatives (customer experience, digital banking experience, data-as-a-service, real-time analytics).

• Alphabet/Google is now the most innovative company in the world according to BCG, unseating Apple’s 13-year dominance of their annual rankings
• Strong AI innovators are over three times more likely to have deep expertise in big data analytics
• The ten most innovative companies in the world extensively use AI and platforms today to grow faster than competitors and markets

As more CIOs and CTOs focus attention on selecting the best-fit IT infrastructure for their particular cognitive computing needs, vendors of semiconductor technologies are exploring new ways to optimize their investment in solutions at the edge of enterprise networks.

Revenue from the sale of artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets for edge inference and inference training will grow at 65% and 137% respectively between 2018 and 2023, according to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research.

During...

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it was launching an open source value-added distribution for search and analytics engine Elasticsearch. As AWS evangelist Jeff Barr put it, the launch would “help continue to accelerate open source Elasticsearch innovation” with the company “strong believers in and supporters of open source...

Cloudera posted total revenues of $144.5 million (£108.9m) for its most recent quarter, and while it may have disappointed investors, the company said its ‘enterprise data cloud’ strategy with Hortonworks on board will help turn things around.

Of total revenues for the quarter ending January 31 – up 36% from this time last year – 85% of it came from subscriptions, while the remainder came from...

Augmented analytics, continuous intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) are among the top trends in big data and analytics that have significant disruptive potential over the next three to five years, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

"The size, complexity, distributed nature of data, speed of action and the continuous intelligence required by digital business means that rigid and centralized architectures and tools break down,” said Donald Feinberg, vice president at...

Open source database provider Redis Labs has announced Redis Source Available License (RSAL), representing a modification of previous licensing terms for its modules and looking towards clarification with the open source and developer communities.

The company had in August changed its terms to Apache2 modified with Commons Clause with more than one eye on the biggest cloud providers, who were packaging Redis technology into proprietary offerings and pocketing...

Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian promised an aggressive approach to enterprise cloud strategy going forward – and the company has immediately put its money where its mouth is with the acquisition of California and Tel Aviv-based startup Alooma.

Alooma aims to solve a key problem for enterprise organisations in their move to the cloud by offering a single data pipeline which is able to crunch data from various...

Reports of the death of the relational database have been greatly exaggerated – at least in the enterprise.

According to a new study from Progress Software – the company’s latest annual data connectivity report – while the on-premises relational database behemoths of SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle have declined year on year, the cloud push is not yet forthcoming for mission-critical workloads.

It’s another big day for big data; analytics platform provider Databricks has raised $250 million (£193.3m) in a series E funding round and now sits atop a $2.75 billion valuation.

The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and featured participation from Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). In a statement, Ben Horowitz said that a16z was “thrilled” to invest in this funding round and that Databricks was the “clear winner in the big data...

When Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest big data behemoths, first announced they were coming together in a $5.2 billion blockbuster merger in October, the questions were almost infinite. Yet the most important two seemed to be: why now? And what does the future hold?