business intelligence

Salesforce.com plans to buy social media monitoring vendor Radian6, whose technology tracks conversations occurring on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the company said Wednesday.

SaaS will steal the show in certain categories but remain a bit player in others, Forrester research shows. Here's a look at how SaaS will affect IT management tools, ERP applications and more, for the next two years.

If you've been following the Jeopardy-IBM Watson faceoff this week, then you have witnessed a breakthrough in analytics and in new architectures for mining and analyzing diverse types of information in a single application. Watson and its successors may usher in a new approach to computing, combining as it does, so many disparate techniques to create a "thinking" machine. IBM has combined deep NLP with machine learning, a voting algorithm, a method of interpreting the questions and assessing them by formulating parallel hypotheses, and Hadoop and UIMA for preprocessing, as well as the usual search, fuzzy matching software and of course an in-memory caching system to save time in retrieval. To me, the strength of this system is the combination of all of these, and it is remarkable in that it doesn't rely on just one. In Watson, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I recently spoke to a professor in the information systems department of the University of Georgia business school. We were talking about the explosive growth in analytics and the need for more investment in analytics education for future business professionals. He proudly spoke about the coverage of analytics, data design and management and allied technology topics in the curriculum for the IT specialization at the business school. Then I asked him about the coverage of analytics in other business school departments, aimed at students aspiring to be finance, marketing, or supply chain professionals. Why couldn't a module on applying analytics to decisions typical of a business function be inserted into each of these business classes? He agreed this would be valuable, but admitted that his school hadn't reached that point yet or even recognized this as an objective.

IT executives at Chevron and TD Bank are testing whether tablets like Apple's iPad and the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook can be used to improve workflow processes int their companies.

Analysing customer data has helped O2 to fine-tune its marketing and target the most profitable customers.

Billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and thousands of projects at IBM are all focused on the same thing: turning scads of enterprise data into useful information.

In the heat of a sales cycle, marketing automation vendors tell you all the great news about how their systems will increase conversion rates, improve sales effectiveness, and save time. When used properly, marketing automation systems do all that. What the sales reps don't tell you is...

Are you struggling to keep the models that inform your company’s decision-making up-to-date with rapidly changing business and economic conditions?