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Text Analytics: The Hurwitz Victory Index

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:41:23 +-500

Authos

Fern Halper, Ph.D, Partner and Principal Analyst

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Daniel Kirsch, Senior Analyst

Unstructured data is everywhere – in emails, call center notes, verbatim survey responses, tweets, blogs, and online news - to name just a few sources. In fact, by most industry estimates, unstructured text accounts for eighty percent of the data available to companies. Text analytics is being embraced at a rapid rate by organizations that want to gain insight into this information and use

it for a competitive advantage. Factors fueling this growth include a better understanding of the technology’s value, a maturing of the technology, the rise of social media as a source of potential insight, and the compute power to help analyze large amounts of data.

In fact, text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal. Hurwitz & Associates defines text analytics as:

Text Analytics is the process of analyzing unstructured text, extracting relevant information, and transforming it into structured information that can be leveraged in various ways.

Winning Mobile and Web Customers with Fast Data

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:00:00 +-500

Winning Mobile and Web Customer with Fast Data

Authors

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Daniel Kirsch, Research Analyst

Sponsored by VMware

Business leaders are finding that they need to dramatically transform the way their organizations engage with customers to remain competitive. Fast Data – the data architecture that supports real-time decision-making – is at the heart of this transformation. Customer’s expectations have evolved. Now, customers expect to have the information needed to make a purchasing decision at the time and place that is right for them. In addition, customers expect customized and instantaneous responses from their suppliers. Businesses increasingly understand that customers expect to be able to interact though web and mobile devices.

Therefore, smart businesses are creating innovative mobile and web applications that delight their customers and build loyalty. But this transformation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Leaders have to rethink their approach to data management. The tables have been turned. Now, the customer controls much of the engagement process. For example, customers increasingly want to choose which device and platform they will use to communicate with their service providers. In addition, customers expect the engagement experience to be seamless and personalized based on their requirements and their relationship to their providers.

Data Management in Transition: Where Are We Heading With Big and Fast Data?

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 04:00:00 +-500

Data Management in Transition: Where Are We Heading With Big and Fast Data?

Authors

Judith Hurwitz, President & CEO

Dr. Fern Halper, Partner

Sponsored by VMware

A confluence of factors has converged to create one of the most important trends in data management – the emergence of Big and Fast Data. These factors include advances in computing technology, the decrease in computer memory prices, the maturation of the Internet, more advanced analytical tools, virtualization, and the cloud. At the same time, business requires immense quantities of data to optimize customer outcomes. This data is being created across all customer channels, including the web, mobile devices, and through in person interactions with customers.

Big and Fast Data is the ability to manage a huge volume of disparate data, at
the right velocity within the right timeframe to allow real-time analysis. This data must be able to be verified based on both accuracy and business context. An innovative business may want to be able to analyze massive amounts of data in real time in order to quickly assess the value of that customer and the potential to provide additional offers to that customer. Therefore, it is necessary to have the right amount of data that can be analyzed in real time to impact business outcomes. Big and Fast Data incorporates all the varieties of data including structured databases, unstructured data from email, social media, text streams, and the like. This kind of data management requires that companies can leverage both their structured and unstructured data.

To use Big and Fast Data for competitive advantage, companies must employ both new data infrastructure technology and new analytic tools that can tame this data. In this paper, we will look at what technical and market forces are driving companies to transform the way they manage and analyze data.

Web API Study: The Benefits of APIs in the App Economy

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:00:00 +-500

Authors

Fern Halper, Partner

Judith Hurwitz, President and CEO

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by Apigee Corporation

This report presents the results of a Hurwitz & Associates Web Application Programming Interface (API) study, “The Benefits of APIs in the App Economy.” This study examined how early adopters of Web APIs were able to gain significant business value by utilizing APIs across multiple platforms and devices. Hurwitz & Associates surveyed more than two dozen leading edge companies that are using APIs to transform their businesses. The results were significant. The research indicates that companies that took advantage of APIs experienced benefits in the following areas:

Significant Improvement in Partner/Customer Reach. There was a greater than 70% increase in connecting to important customers and partners to build more profitable relationships.
Increase in Web Traffic. There was 70% increase in web traffic and a 50% increase in web service usage by customers once the Web API was implemented.
Faster Time to Onboard Partners. Early adopters discovered that there was a 30% decrease in the amount of time required to onboard partners. At the same time there was a 30% increase in the ability to bring new innovative ideas to market quickly.

Creating Application awareness in IT Virtualization Environments

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:00:00 +-500

Author

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by IBM

As IT organizations work to increase the flexibility, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of their data centers, many have focused on server virtualization. These companies are also leveraging server virtualization as an important starting point for their journey to adopt cloud computing. However, server virtualization alone is not sufficient to help companies realize the full compliment of cloud computing benefits. In essence, to achieve a wellmanaged data center requires a more application centric approach. One way to ensure that the end user is supported as part of the virtualization strategy is to make the resource allocation process application aware.

Why is this issue so important? The use of applications is not static. It is common that during certain business cycles, the demands on a particular application will increase and therefore require additional unanticipated computing resources. When this happens in a heavily virtualized environment, the virtual machines that are supporting the application may not be able to handle the changing workload.

Companies need a way to prioritize applications not only based on infrastructure requirements and policies, but with an understanding of the business context of the applications in question. In order for companies to ensure that the most business critical applications are given top priority, its service polices must reflect the relative business impact of each application. Server virtualization allows the addition of entirely new virtual machines to an application, but this takes time, and the spike could be gone before the new resources are ready. Furthermore, the action of adding a new virtual machine is only useful if the system knows when to use it. Server virtualization products can look at system metrics such as memory and CPU usage, but this gives only a very high level view of what’s really going on, and completely ignores any difference in the priority of different workloads in periods of resource contention. As such, with server virtualization alone these additional applications may suffer poor performance even if they have a higher priority to the business.

Creating Dynamic Business Networks: Removing IT Silos to Create Smarter Computing

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:00:00 +-500

Author

Judith Hurwitz, CEO

Sponsored by IBM

The world of Information Technology is changing from a set of disconnected silos to a dynamic foundation that supports a more agile and flexible business environment. To support the need for business change demands that IT assets become a pool of resources and integrated information sources. This new emphasis on leveraging assets is directly tied to economic transformation across increasingly important business networks. Companies are beginning to understand that their competitive value in the markets they serve are directly related to the way they empower their ecosystem of customers, partners, and suppliers. Traditional techniques of managing these relationships are becoming too costly and inefficient. At the same time, companies are recognizing that their survival depends on their ability to innovate and offer new products and services that leverage their intellectual property. This innovation has to be achieved in the context of flat or declining budgets. In this paper, we provide an overview of IBM’s Smarter Computing initiative and how it recognizes the changes taking place within the IT paradigm.

Victory Index Report for Predictive Analytics

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:43:52 +-500

Predictive analytics has become a key component of a competitive company’s analytics arsenal. It is one of the most important trends in analytics because in difficult economic environment companies need to have a better ability to anticipate where markets are headed and where customer demand will be. Predictive analytics provides the capability to use more sophisticated techniques to understand trends and anticipate future outcomes. Among its use cases, companies across many industries are using predictive analytics to understand customer behavior and requirements, predict equipment failures, and understand propensity to spend.

In the inaugural Victory Index Report, Hurwitz & Associates examines critical trends and assesses twelve key players in the predictive analytics market. Designed as a market research assessment tool, the Victory Index analyzes vendors across four key dimensions: Vision, Viability, Validity and Value. A rigorous methodology that employs approximately 50 attributes across these four dimensions is applied in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the market and the vendors. The report provides two rating assessments- one from the perspective of the vendors’ market strength and the other from the customer perspective. IBM SPSS, SAS, StatSoft, and Pegasystems were named Double Victors. Pitney Bowes and Angoss, were Victors in a specific category, due to strengths in key market areas. Other vendors assessed in this Report include Megaputer Intelligence, Rapid-I, Revolution Analytics, SAP, and TIBCO.

Demonstrated Benefits of Software Delivery Automation – an Analyst Study

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:00:00 +-500

Authors

Judith Hurwitz, President
Fern Halper, Ph.D, Partner
Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by IBM

Solution focus: IBM Rational Build Forge and IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere (RAFW)

Software is a strategic asset that helps companies differentiate themselves from competitors, improve service, and optimize performance results. Business applications are pivotal in determining a company’s ability to grow and change in light of competitive threats and opportunities. Successful organizations have the infrastructure in place to automate processes that ensure consistency, predictability, and manageability of their applications environments. Consider that, only a few years ago, a typical application was changed no more than a few times a year. In contrast, software development, deployment, and operations are now in a constant state of change. It is now quite common for organizations to require weekly or even daily modification to software releases in order to remain competitive. Additionally, development and delivery groups are being asked to deliver new software at an increasing rate.

The Challenge of Managing On-line Transaction Processing Applications in the Cloud Computing World

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:00:00 +-500

Author

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by CloudTran

In highly competitive markets, companies are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a way to improve their ability to react to market changes. Whether we are looking at financial services, healthcare, or retail, cloud computing is becoming a strategic approach. Many industries are grappling with the complexities of ensuring that online transaction applications can be effectively and safely managed in highly distributed cloud environments. Processes and technologies designed for lower transaction volumes operating in siloed environments cannot easily support unbounded transaction volumes operating in cloud and service oriented environments. Organizations with a requirement to run mission-critical online transaction processing (OLTP) applications need to manage these extreme volumes effectively in order to provider optimal service to customers.

In this paper, we present an overview of the requirements for running OLTP applications in multi-processing and cloud environments using a retail ecommerce example. In addition, we provide insight into evolving technology requirements for overcoming scalability challenges in nonmainframe distributed environments. We also will provide a perspective on managing near real-time access to data required to support OLTP transactions in non-mainframe distributed environments.

Advanced Analytics Whitepaper

Wed, 18 May 2011 17:06:18 +-500

Results from an online survey of 160 companies in January 2011 on advanced analytics