„How far is Cluj Napoca from Brașov?”. „Where do I found the first oil station on my way from Brașov to Cluj Napoca?”. You may type those phrase fast, but certainly you can say it even faster. And when you`re on the go, speed is what you`re looking for. As communication needs to evolve more quickly, Google invests in development of new technologies to improve the experience of web search on mobile devices. Voice Search allows users to search on the Internet as easy as talking on the phone. The application uses a vocal technology to transform spoken words into text and then performs the query on the Google search engine like text would be entered manually. All data are processed through technologies hosted in the cloud, not on the mobile phone, which means that the application is fast and easy to use.
Google often experimenting with new functions throughout its services portfolio. Although such features are rarely open for regular users, this time we are dealing with an exception to the rule.
Google has begun offering more details about the possibility of integrating Gmail messages, related to the searched keywords, among the results to a common search. Thankfully, personal emails aren't arbitrary slips through those results, so that can not be seen by everyone. But how does it works this new Google`s functionality? It is quite simple.
„If you're not ready to ride it, you'll be swept away by a tsunami of change that will fundamentally alter the world. And mobile computing is a tipping point technology for the information revolution, a revolution that began with writing on clay tablets, and continued through the invention of the printing press and computers. Mobile will be the catalyst that brings society the most dramatic changes of the Information Revolution”.
MicroStrategy, the largest independent provider of Business Intelligence solutions in the world, just launched the new 9.3 version of its business intelligence solution. The update enhances the platform's Visual Insight user environment, improves to its ability to handle 'Big Data', and incorporates advanced analytics from R — an open source programming language for statistical computing.
The most important upgrades in MicroStrategy 9.3 are centered on Visual Insight, a data visualization module, intuitive and accessible to business users who aren't schooled in query languages or statistical analysis. New geospatial density maps use color coding to represent geospatial concentrations, such as customers in proximity to retail stores. Image layouts let analysts depict data in context, showing, for example, sales by region, customer traffic by department in a store, or productivity on a manufacturing production line. New network diagrams show relationships among items, such website pages visited and checkout results on an e-commerce site.
R-based computational models within standard MicroStrategy reports and dashboards
As the list of data visualization possibilities grows it can become harder for users to pick the best approach, so the Visual Insight upgrade automatically suggests the best-fit visualization option. Easing access to the latest data sources, MicroStrategy 9.3 also features a new integration to Hadoop clusters. Where the BI vendor previously integrated with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), a new Thrift connector taps into Apache Hive, which is the Hadoop framework's data warehousing component.
Access to big data fuels interest in big data analytics, so MicroStrategy 9.3 greatly expands on the 300 analytical functions the platform already supported with new support for the more than 5,000 computations available within the R open-source statistical programming language. The R language is heavily used by data scientists who also tend to store their large-scale data sets on Hadoop. The 9.3 release lets users invoke R-based computational models and visualizations within standard MicroStrategy reports and dashboards. The upgrade supports R through use of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) language and through direct embedding of R algorithms as MicroStrategy analytical functions.
Self-service dashboarding and System Manager administrative console
Other upgrades in MicroStrategy 9.3 include self-service dashboarding and administrative improvements. The vendor said design improvements make it possible for business users to develop dashboards in fewer than 10 minutes without help from IT. The dashboarding module is newly flexible, according to MicroStrategy, supporting both multiple data sets and multiple data visualizations on a single page. Previously it was difficult to tap multiple data sources and apply multiple data visualizations with a single dashboard.
Automation is the theme behind upgrades to the MicroStrategy 9.3 Systems Manager administrative console. For instance, the multiple steps in system restarts, or cache flushing routines, or data warehouse loading processes can be programmed with a new administrative workflow tool. Using a new scripting language and process tool, administrators can automate any series of steps that previously had to be executed manually. The tool promises to save huge amounts of administrative time and effort, according to MicroStrategy, and it can integrated with third-party tools to monitor administrative routines.
The first step to MicroStrategy Cloud
The product was revealed at the company's MicroStrategy World conference, being held in Amsterdam, along with its Facebook-focused product Wisdom Professional. MicroStrategy 9.3 will make its first appearance as part of MicroStrategy Cloud, which bundles the BI platform, databases, and data-integration capabilities as a Web-based service, under the name MicroStrategy Cloud Express. With Express, users can build, schedule, and deliver dashboards and reports to any number of users, but subscribers pay only for the services consumed each month and they can upgrade to the Platform service level as needed.
Sources: MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Official Blog, The Wall Street Journal, mobilemarketingmagazine.com
The success of an organization depends on the method and speed of responding to changing market conditions. Therefore, Business Intelligence is often defined as the array of processes and technologies that turn information into insight and action, to effectively understand, predict, optimize, and prepare to take action upon current and future business activity.
BI applications find their way into a vast range of business areas including CRM, ERP, financial management, etc. They employ technologies such as: data mining, text mining, geographic information systems, language translation, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, simulation, and advanced visualization.
Part of Google Apps, Google Sites makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites you can build any website (intranet, corporate website, team, project, department, wikis and more) and share rich content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, video documents, forms, images, etc) without having to write code. But you don't want that everything you displayed on those sites to be seen by everyone. Or you want that certain people in your company have access to a limited number of documents posted on the Google Sites, but not all. With page-level permissions, you will be able to control who can view and edit your Google Site on a page by page basis.
From Government departments through small local companies, information can be extremely valuable to organizations. However, this useful information often ends up trapped in files or databases, inaccessible to the average employee or user. Also, the explosion of information stored in multiple formats that needs to be accessed by both internal staff and a distributed workforce (dealers, vendors, etc) only complicates the problem. The need for organizations to quickly respond to market changes, innovate, and accelerate their time to market increased in direct proportion to their structural complexity. So, it’s no wonder that 39% of a knowledge worker’s time is wasted on searching for information or recreating existing content.
When it comes to the cost of the cloud, it is important to analyze all cloud`s models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Those three different service models for the delivery of cloud computing provide companies with the ability to mix and match the best service model to the business needs of their organization, based on requirements and payment options and depending on the vertical industry and specific applications portfolio.
As I already said in a previous post, there are a number of questions that show up frequently enough regarding the cloud computing and the switch to cloud. And the decision to migrate or not to cloud solutions hangs often by the answers to those questions.
The first question is „What is the true meaning of the Cloud?”.
As with any major technology transformation, there are many definitions of cloud computing. In very simple terms, cloud computing is a new consumption and delivery model for information technology (IT) and business services that is characterized by: on-demand self-service, location independent resource pooling, rapid horizontal and vertical scaling, pay-per-use. And the exciting impact comes from enabling new service consumption and delivery models that support business model innovation.
Do you use webmail? Or Gmail / Yahoo! Mail / Hotmail, etc? Do you communicate by messenger, whether it’s GTalk, Live Messenger, Yahoo, Skype or others? Then it means that you are in „cloud”. Messenger is the simplest example of cloud: an application that uses an instant communication service hosted on a server about which you know nothing.
This is the main cloud's philosophy: services pending on servers in different datacenters, which can be used with or without charge. To access and use a cloud computing based service you don't have to install anything and don't need extra storage space. All you need is just a web browser and an Internet connection.
Briefly, this means cloud computing. And, according to several studies conducted by IT services or IT research & consulting leading companies (Google, Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester Research, etc), more and more companies started to search for cloud solutions, trying to extra streamline operational processes and reduce costs.
It is true: cloud computing get rid of hardware investment, licenses payments and significantly increase your uptime. But every time, the managers ask the same question: „How do we measure the cloud's benefits?”.
The first quantifiable benefit is related to savings on infrastructure and operational costs. When you purchase a cloud service based on monthly or annual fee, you actually don't buy the software, you rent it. Speaking in economic terms, you will move costs from CAPEX to OPEX. You no longer have costs and depreciation assessments on those services, because you lease the service. You use and pay such as water, gas, electricity, heat.
The second benefit is that you pay strictly as you use. For example, you own a company working on projects. Sometimes you are simultaneously involved in 3-4 projects, other times just in one. Therefore, If you want the service on 25 computers, then on 50 and sometimes on 10, you can do it by paying strictly what you use. In this way optimizing costs and aligning them to the company`s activity.
In the third place, you have a much higher uptime than you could provide yourself. For example, Google has an uptime of 99.99% to those who have an active SLA.
The fourth benefit is an increased mobility. In Cloud, data is accessible anytime, anywhere, from any device connected to the Internet. This means that users can access data from office, home or travel, on laptop, PC tablet or smartphone, by using a web browser.
Last but not least, several studies demonstrated that by giving up to your company server-room, you will achieve a substantial shrinkage to electricity bills. Utilities (like cooling or power) are better used in cloud, making your company more profitable and "environmentally friendly".
Source: Forbes, Small Business Blog, Go Cloud, Agora, PC World
