Beeline Wins “Academy Award for Business”

 

For any film actor, the Academy Award is the highest honor. For primetime television personalities, the Emmy reigns supreme. To win a Grammy as a recording artist is a dream come true. In the world of business intelligence and analytics, the BI Editor’s Choice Awards 2012 is an honor that only elite companies win because of the analytic tools they choose to deploy. Beeline is such an elite company that has earned the esteemed honor.

Beeline is a provider of intelligent workforce solutions and offers services and software to companies to help them with their contingent labor needs. As some artists are naturally talented and are able to achieve success on stage, in front of the camera, or at a recording studio, they never credit their accomplishments simply to themselves. When they are standing in front of an audience ready to receive an award, there is always a list of people that need to be thanked for making their achievement possible. Beeline has TIBCO Spotfire® on top of that list to thank for helping them become more successful in terms of business intelligence and analytics. [Read more...]

Gartner Makes the Case for Complex Event Processing to Keep Up with Real-time Big Data

TIBCO’s complex event processing and in-memory data grid solutions are the perfect way to solve the problem that Gartner’s Roy W. Schulte and Bill Gassman call, “the conventional save and process paradigm” that isn’t fast enough for today’s big data challenges.

The enterprise world is becoming more time-critical by the moment. The need to analyze real-time data for opportunities, risks and efficiencies before putting it into a database is moving companies to complex event processing combined with in-memory storage.

“We found Roy Schulte and Bill Gassman’s report on complex event processing’s role in Big Data to be very insightful,” said Ivan Casanova, Senior Director of Product Marketing, TIBCO. “We could not agree more that changing conditions, including greater volume, velocity and variety of data is making the conventional save-and-process paradigm obsolete for big data.” [Read more...]

DEBS2012 on Event Patterns

At DEBS last month, a few members of the EPTS Reference Architecture team tutored on the latest Functional Event Patterns list – with sample and pseudocode implementations – covering all aspects of event preparation, analysis, (complex event) detection, and reaction. From a TIBCO CEP perspective, this version mostly covers TIBCO BusinessEvents rule patterns (i.e. how these functional patterns map to a standard event-based production rule pseudocode), with a few references to BE State Models and the odd BE Continuous Query [*1]. These can be viewed alongside examples from Oracle EP, IBM WODM, IBM Stream Insight and the PROLOG-based Prova.

This remains very much a work-in-progress [*2], but should give a good idea of where we are heading. In the “real world,” it should be noted that often many of these functions are combined into a single operation (eg: covering preparation/filtering, analysis/transformation, detection/composition and reaction/assessment in a single rule or query). [Read more...]

“I Love LogLogic”: Lucille Ball and The Lowry Entertain Millions

So much can be said about funny woman Lucille Ball. Aside from being a queen of comedy, she was an innovator in the entertainment industry. Changing the way sitcoms would be filmed forever, Lucille Ball not only became an icon in front of the camera, but a successful businesswoman behind the scenes. She was the first woman to own her own Hollywood television studio. Also, the “I Love Lucy” show was the first sitcom to be filmed in front of a live studio audience with multiple cameras, a technique still used in Hollywood over 60 years later. No matter if it was running the operations of her studio, or making millions laugh in their homes, Lucille Ball brought entertainment to many.

Just as Lucy aspired to bring laughs into the homes of those with television sets, The Lowry, a prestigious theatre and arts centre in Greater Manchester, England aspires to bring together a wide variety of performing and visual arts under one roof and open its doors to the best in entertainment. Like any successful company or famous actress, sometimes a little help is necessary from an outside source before one is ready for a close-up. Although “I Love Lucy” was filmed in black and white, what is most visually iconic about the comedienne is her bright red hair. Undeniably, Lucy was naturally talented, but the red hair let her stand out. [Read more...]

Top 5 Reasons To Attend TUCON + Extreme Information!

Come hear Michael O’Connell, Phd., Senior Director Analytics, speak at TUCON 2012!

An excerpt from one of his recent papers, titled Big Data Analytics, states:

“An effective systems platform for the 21st century enterprise has five key elements.

First, it must detect relevant patterns and correlations amidst the torrent of big data and events that surround any business today, so that an enterprise can interpret what is happening at a point of sale, an instance of risk, or what is generically called the “moment of truth.”

Second, such a platform must provide powerful analytic capabilities so that anyone can interpret what is happening at that moment of truth and immediately understand the implications.

Third, the platform should have the muscle or automation to initiate corrective action based on recognized patterns, as well as the flexibility to compose and assemble new lightweight applications on the fly, as needed.

Fourth, the platform should scale elastically across both on-premise and cloud environments.

Finally, the platform should provide a natural environment for collaboration — one that marries systems and people into a single unified desktop.”

TOP 5 Reasons to Attend this Year!

  1. BIG DATA: Learn how to scale up and out as an Event-Enabled Enterprise
  2. FREE 1:1 TRAINING: Big Data is a Big Deal. Since 2008, all of the data in the world has increased ten-fold. In a special session entitled, “Big Data is Getting Bigger: Scaling Up and Out for Bigger Deployments with In-Memory Computing,” hear TIBCO outline the best ways to extract actionable insight from massive data volumes and multiple types of information.
  3. WHAT ARE OTHERS DOING?: Fascinating Analytics Case Studies. Leading companies from around the world will take the stage to showcase how they are using analytics to transform their businesses and achieve the two-second advantage™. Featured companies will be announced shortly.
  4. MEET THE ANALYSTS: Top Market-shaping Analysts. Several well-known industry leading experts are scheduled to speak on analytics at TUCON.
  5. WHAT’S NEXT?: Sneak peek at tomorrow’s Spotfire. Lars Bauerle, VP of Product Management, presents Spotfire’s statement of direction in “A Look Ahead: Tibco Spotfire Analytics.

Register today to get the breaking agenda additions and make sure you get alerts for first-come, first-serve programs.

For a detailed agenda and more information on TUCON, visit here.

Operating a 21st-Century Enterprise

There are remarkable shifts going on in the world that are changing the way business is done. When we see disruption happening and it isn’t about an emerging market, it is about this very shift. Before we go into the ‘what’, let’s look at the ‘why.’

When we began to computerize, we did it to solve very specific problems, starting with accounting. Pretty soon, integration became the way to connect many problem-solving solutions, and it was quite messy and terribly point-to-point. This was the golden age of IT departments as any application functionality and any integration between systems flowed throw their hands. It launched the role of the CIO as the same level as the COO with all of the political ramifications that followed.

Big platforms like ERP and CRM came along as the way to ‘tie together’ all of those point solutions but, in the process, created the monolithic systems that everyone loves to hate. The single, big database became an important source for enterprise information. Speed mattered less than resilience and centralization.

That brings us to today. [Read more...]

Using Real-Time Data to Predict the Future: TIBCO Helps Rent-A-Center Put Customers First

A famous quote from Peter Drucker says, Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.” I learned this during my MBA days, and it seems to have relevance at a more granular level these days. In the present age of shorter selling opportunities and changing expectations of a customer, the customer must receive value from every single purchase. Questions that businesses need to ask are: Is it possible that these customers wanted other product(s), which could have provided greater value to them? Was there any insight into the customer’s wants and expectations before selling? The answers lie in the revealing truth that companies forget to uncover the voice of the customer and create a value in context. Today, Peter Drucker’s quality theory needs to be applied to all transactions you do with the quality product or service you’ve built.

Businesses have to shift from after-the-fact marketing analysis to real-time analysis at the point of sale and be able to predict the next purchase from a customer. Businesses need to adopt “intelligent selling” by aggregating real-time data from various touch points of customer interaction and combine the new data with historical information on customer [Read more...]

Customer Disservice

The coffee grinder you ordered arrives broken, which is bad enough, but when you realize you’ll have to contact customer service, things get much worse. Ten digits later, you’re on hold listening to a never-ending loop of some Kenny G. imitator’s latest single.

With every minute that passes, an automated message assures you that your call is important, and with every minute you trust its sincerity less and less. By the time someone picks up the phone, it’s like you’ve never heard someone’s voice before. It takes you a second to remember how to speak, and why you even called in the first place. Right, the coffee grinder… it arrived broken. You want them to replace it, give you a refund, or something. Mostly you just want to be able to grind coffee.

No help. They tell you it isn’t their problem, and you’ll need to contact the manufacturer. The process starts all over again with different hold music. This time, it ends with the manufacturer telling you to contact the retailer.

You contact the retailer again, and by some miracle you’re connected with the most helpful customer service representative in the world. She listens to your problem and outlines everything she’s going to do to fix it. Then your phone dies, and you’re disconnected.

You call again, but no one remembers you.

“I was just talking to someone… she said her name was Cathy? I want to be reconnected to her.”

“Sorry, no one by that name works here, and we have no way of knowing who you were speaking to. Have you tried contacting the manufacturer?”

You’re pretty sure her name was Cathy. Katie, maybe? Where did she go? Was she ever really there in the first place? What if she’s just some psychological manifestation of everything your customer service experience has been lacking? The hold music must be playing tricks on you.

You hang up the phone, and decide to switch to tea.

Find Cathy at TUCON 2012. Hear how TIBCO is helping companies improve their customer experience and put an end to hold music hypnosis. 

Calling All London Games Data Geeks – We Have an App for That

TIBCO Spotfire has an app for the social mania surrounding the London Games. This is the first time the games have been so social, so we teamed up with Attivio to help you wade through the overwhelming volume of big data (or social media data in this case) to find the insights from the previous 24 hours of activity on Twitter from athletes, fans and even detractors.

The London Athletes Social Mania app gives you access to what’s trending in athletes and phrases, and lets you look at the positive and negative sentiments that are associated with those Tweets.

Syed Mahmood, Spotfire product marketing manager, says that with our partnership with Attivio “we can offer any fan, from anywhere in the world, an opportunity to look beyond ‘medals won’ and really get involved in what’s being said, whether it’s about a current or former athlete, a particular country, or the latest faux pas in London.”

Instead of writing about what you can do with this app, we’re going to show you the overview and send you off to “more than medal watch.”

London Athletes Social Mania App Tour

1. Breakdown search by Topic or Athlete. The app breaks down the top 2-keyword and 3-keyword phrases by topic and athlete. The following screenshot is by topic.

[Read more...]

Win a Gold in the Olympics of Business Analytics by Trying on Usain Bolt’s Gold Shoes

 

The fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt, came to the 2012 Olympics in London with four gold medals and three world records. In his first event of these Olympics, he won another gold medal to add to his collection. There is much more to note about the Jamaican runner besides his astonishing speed, though it could be hard to keep sight of him as he races around the track. From his signature pose to his gold running shoes, Bolt is not only an amazing athlete, but has become an iconic figure in the world of Track and Field. Running a mile in this man’s shoes may not make you as fast as him, but in the world of real-time analytics and optimization, trying on TIBCO Spotfire DecisionSite sped up Dialog Semiconductor to an Olympic level.

Dialog Semiconductor creates the world’s most energy-efficient, highly integrated, mixed-signal integrated circuits. These are optimized for personal mobile and automotive applications. Even though the company creates gold medal integrated circuits, they still needed Bolt’s gold shoes to help them get record times in their business analytics for performance improvements. Spotfire is the pair of gold running shoes the company was looking for. [Read more...]