Big Data Gets Smarter [Infographic]

Data scientists may be scarce, but big data news certainly isn’t. Quite frankly it’s hard to keep up with it all.

While in a world of unlimited space and time we’d be able to shed light on everything that’s notable, we can’t because our world is a bit more limited. So what we’ve chosen to do this week is bring you the stories we would have covered in long form had we had the bandwidth.

Teradata Introduces Big Data Apps

Data is worthless unless you can derive insight from it and take action on what you’ve learned. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. But what’s a whole lot more difficult is getting from A to Z. After all, it’s no secret that big data is hard to work with and that data scientists are often so overloaded with requests that the moment of opportunity for the business often passes before they receive the insights they need.

Teradata aims to solve that problem with The Teradata Aster AppCenter, which it launched yesterday. It has been designed to help business users tackle issues that are best solved with big data analytics, such as customer acquisition and retention, financial fraud, paths to purchase and marketing optimization. It is industry focused on sectors such as consumer finance, entertainment and gaming, healthcare, retail and telecommunications. The big data apps use AppCenter, which provides a common framework to build, deploy and consume interactive, web-based applications.

Dan Vesset, program vice president of IDC's Business Analytics research, said this offering is “a significant step forward” for Teradata in that it expands their solution set to include applications “that make the analytics accessible for the typical business user.” It’s worth noting that the AppCenter will be available in the second quarter this year and that you need to have Teradata Aster Database 6.0 deployed on premises or in the cloud to use it.

True or False? Data Scientists Hate Data

If you’ve heard acclaimed data scientist Hilary Mason talk about data, you’d think it was the sexiest thing ever. Her eyes light up, there’s passion in her voice, she talks about play and there’s a certain sort of confidence in her language that suggests that she can uncover the deep stories it can tell.

But the team at CrowdFlower maintains data is often “dirty” and that data scientists loathe cleaning it. CrowdFlower’s remedy is to apply a salve to the problem by crowdsourcing data work by distributing small, discrete tasks to many online contributors in assembly line fashion. Their moniker claims they’ll bring one billion tasks to 5 million contributors, leaving the data scientists with more time to spend on activities that provide more value.

They conducted a survey to reveal insights on: What it’s like to be a data scientist? What are their biggest challenges? And what’s on their wish list?

You’ll find the results in the infographic below.

Datameer Sets Departments Free to Deploy HaaS

Datameer, which provides a big data insights platform for rapid data discovery announced the availability of Datameer Professional, a big data analytics Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), targeted for department-specific deployments. They’ve partnered with Altiscale whose Altiscale Data Cloud is a Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) cloud purpose-built for high performance and elastic scalability. They’ve also partnered with Bigstep in Europe.

Datameer Professional is aimed at the business user who wants to start integrating, preparing, analyzing and visualizing all of their data right away. As a fully managed hosted software-as-a-service, the product does not require any DevOps or cloud administration.

Syncsort: Future-Proof Your Hadoop Investments

Forget data scientists and data-driven insights for a second. One of the big reasons enterprises are adopting Hadoop is that it’s a cheaper way to store information. But making a move from data warehouses and proprietary hardware isn’t a cinch, which is why Syncsort’s DMX 8 might be a big deal.

If it delivers as promised, its architecture will allow businesses to get their data into new Hadoop computing frameworks without having to do translation work or coding and Syncsort claims that they can easily make it work with anything, “whether it’s MapR today, Spark or Tez tomorrow or a tool not yet in existence."

And Coming Up

Be on the look out for lots of big data news next week as Pivotal and Microsoft are set to make big announcements and O’Reilly’s Strata + Hadoop World kicks off in San Jose, Calif.

 Title image by JuditK.