Analysis Last month, Forbes published its list of America’s 100 most innovative leaders. The report’s methodology was based on four ‘essential leadership qualities of top founders and CEOs’. These were, in no particular order, perception in the media for innovation, social connections, and ‘value creation’, both in terms of track record and investor expectations.

There was, however, one glaring...

Forbes has put out its latest Cloud 100, and while payments provider Stripe remains top of the shop the big five has a refreshing feel to it.

Stripe remains at #1 for the third successive year in the media firm’s list of private cloud companies – as in cloud companies which are privately held – while behind it the top five consists of data warehouse Snowflake, robotic process automation (RPA) provider UiPath, infrastructure...

Managing big data apps is a challenge for many IT organisations. Moreover, chief data officers (CDOs) and their data and analytics (DA) teams are not achieving the best balance required to deliver superior performance, according to the latest market study by Gartner.

"CDOs are generally focused upon the right things, but they do not have the right mix of activities," said Debra Logan, vice president at Gartner.

Data and analytics market development

The Gartner...

More and more businesses are waking up to the significant opportunities that embracing artificial intelligence (AI) could offer – from improved customer service to increased productivity. But simply not knowing where to start on their digital transformation journey can often hold them back.

A major benefit of AI is the potential to use new technology to gather fresh insights from data. If that sounds like something your company could benefit from, the best place to embark on your digital transformation...

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...