Conflicting Data or the Data Divide?

December 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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This week there have been two reports released. One from Ofcom (independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries), which has reported that the UK’s mobile users are consuming more data on their phones and tablets than any other leading nation for the first time. A second from the Office for National Statistics has reported that 7.63 million adults in the UK have never used the internet, which is 15% of the population. They have coined a moniker for these people – “The Internots.”

So are the reports wrong? Or is there something else happening?

Let’s explore the reports in a little more detail.

Ofcom’s report, which you can download here, shows that the UK has one of the highest levels of penetration of smartphones in the world at 58%of the population, while just fewer than one in five owns a tablet computer. As a result, British consumers are downloading the most data on mobiles and tablets. In December 2011, the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data, higher than any other leading country, pushing Japan into second place at 392 megabytes and the US into sixth at 319 megabytes.

One-sixth of all website traffic in the UK was on a mobile, tablet or other connected device, higher than any other country in Europe. James Thickett, Ofcom’s director of research, said: “Our research shows that UK consumers continue to benefit from one of the most advanced markets for communications products and services.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Processing, Tech Trends Tagged With: , ,

Connecting ActiveSpaces and Hadoop

September 25, 2012 by 4 Comments
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TIBCO is pleased to announce that we’re making code available that connects TIBCO ActiveSpaces to Apache Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Pig, and Apache Hive.  Hadoop and ActiveSpaces both support data-intensive distributed applications, and so they’re the perfect match!

Hadoop’s HDFS™ is designed to hold files of petabyte size, but the architectural tradeoff that was made is that you don’t get random access to that file – you have to read the whole thing.  Hadoop has some other storage technologies like HBase™ that have some more random access, but they have nothing like the in-memory data grid that ActiveSpaces provides.  With ActiveSpaces, you get random access to all of your data, without ever having to hit a disk, and with peer-to-peer replication, keeping Big Data in memory is quite feasible.

The code that we’re making available comes in three parts.  The first part integrates ActiveSpaces into the core MapReduce functionality, and provides an InputFormat and an OutputFormat for ActiveSpaces.  Take your class that describes your Tuples, and inherit from the simple provided interface ASWritable.  Now you can use MapReduce to create operations on all the Tuples in your space, and chain them together in all the standard MapReduce ways.

If, on the other hand, you’d prefer not to write Java™ code, but would prefer to script your data flows in Pig, the code supplies a LoadFunc and a StoreFunc that allow full interoperability between Pig and ActiveSpaces.  Now the dataflows that you’ve designed in Pig can read from, and write to ActiveSpaces, taking advantage of all ActiveSpaces has to offer. [Read more...]

Filed Under: general Tagged With: , ,

Patient Safety: Going Well Beyond a Checklist

March 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Patient Safety WeekWith National Patient Safety Awareness Week coming to a close, we thought we would give some attention to this important topic.

In following this week’s articles, blog posts and tweets, much of the discussion about patient safety has centered on the treatment a patient receives during a procedure or hospital stay, so we asked Dr. Gary Ferguson, one of TIBCO’s Chief Healthcare Strategists, for his perspective. In his words he feels strongly that: “Many of these approaches are treating the symptoms, and not the cause.”

This is a good point. Take for example the case of hospital readmissions.  It’s well known that CMS will begin penalizing hospitals if their readmission rate exceeds standards.

So what should caregivers be focused on in order to achieve patient safety, and how does technology fit into the overall goals? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, BPM, Event Processing, general, Healthcare, Industries, Social, Tech Trends, Transform, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: , , , ,

Are IBM and Oracle Stuck in the 20th Century?

January 31, 2012 by 1 Comment
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Interesting advice to CIOs, although not surprising to us at TIBCO, analyst Dennis Gaughan heavily criticized IBM and Oracle for relying on maintaining profit margins rather than trying to better serve their customers through innovation. At a Gartner Symposium, he said “IBM pitches itself as a thought leader with marketing campaigns such as ‘Smarter Planet’… [but] focused on contract negotiation – understanding the terms and variability of what is licensed, what is negotiable, whether multi-year discounts are available, and whether the CIO can leverage a large IT spend to get a good deal. The number one question is: how do you avoid being managed by IBM?”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, Event Processing, general, Transform Tagged With: , , ,

Big Data vs. Event Processing

January 26, 2012 by 2 Comments
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Database pundit Curt Monash made a brief mention of event processing (/event stream processing) in his discussion on “big data terminology”, presumably as a response to the discussion he started with Forrester’s Brian Hopkins where Brian (very reasonably IMHO) defined “big data” as: “techniques and technologies that make handling data at extreme scale economical.”

With “extreme scale” being defined mainly by the metrics of volume and “velocity” – with the latter being the obvious area of interest from an event processing perspective, as stated by Curt: “Low-volume/high-velocity problems are commonly referred to as ‘event processing’ and/or ‘streaming.’”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Event Processing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Cyber Attacks On the Rise: Are Mission Critical System at Risk?

December 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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ShellImagine a bunch of hackers plotting to destroy a large oil production facility. As they finish their code, they become increasingly giddy about the havoc they’re about to unleash. From here, it’s point, click, attack. The facility is in flames, lives are lost, and the price of crude jumps manifold.

No, this isn’t a scene out of a bad sci-fi flick; it’s the new reality of cyber attacks. BBC reported Shell saying at a conference today that the oil giant is seeing more and more cyber attacks on its mission-critical systems. Since computers control nearly all the world’s energy production and distribution, the consequences of large-scale cyber attacks can be monumental—and even fatal.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Cyber Security Tagged With: , , , , ,