SigmaWay Blog

According to author Avneet Gupta (Country Manager, IBM Collaboration Solutions, IBM India), with advancement in technology and workforce dynamics, organizations today are totally focused on socially-enabling business developments. By rethinking and reworking the existing processes through a social business lens, the workforce gets more involved, operative and productive thereby delivering great returns for organizations. The biggest concern is therefore to better understand employees along with supervising the transformational changes required for constant innovation and alteration of the workforce. The progressive organizations globally have already invested in adapting to social changes for smarter workforce. Read more at: http://www.indiaonward.com/the-power-of-rethinking-the-work-through-a-social-business-lens/

Several financial services clients currently are successfully building a robust suite of information platforms to offer a superior variety of resources for its researchers. With a unique platform that offers value to users, the job of researchers to help clients with current, assorted needs for market data is enhanced. The need for robust information platform is clearly due to a continual demand for market data. Other than the immediate availability of the data, researchers also need the data to be presented in a complimentary layout that boosts the usability of the data, which is a principal requirement of platform functionality. Read more at: http://blog.marketresearch.com/how-market-research-solutions-complement-financial-services-firms%E2%80%99-existing-data-resources

A computer technology company wanted an automatic solution to classify customer problems and complaints that were posted on the company's Tech Forums as well as agent transcripts associated with customer calls that were stored in databases. It wanted a "text mining and codification engine" to which Natural Language Processing could be applied to categorize conversations automatically and thus aid Microsoft in analyzing text data objectively and quantitatively. The solution provided had four major milestones: Data Access, Data Loading, Classification Design, Development Accuracy, and Validation Accuracy. The text mining framework provided was able to categorize the texts automatically into five stages of classification. Thus with the assurance of accurate results, the company was able to take quick informed decisions based on customer feedback. Read more at: http://analyticsindiamag.com/advanced-text-mining-by-extracting-insights-from-various-forums-helps-in-addressing-and-analyzing-customer-feedback/

According to author Shreya Sharma, with Big Data becoming an essential part of an organization, it is getting harder to balance it with data privacy. Marketers should be clear about the data they are collecting and make sure that data storage and security infrastructure are safeguarded, otherwise it can have serious effects on the company as most consumers expect a company to protect their personal data, and their consuming behavior depends on this. It is therefore crucial to bear a high level of awareness with regards to the significance of data privacy and protection. The responsibility should be seen as norm and not just be restricted to people who are directly involved in mining big data. To know more, please follow: http://analyticsindiamag.com/in-action-how-companies-should-follow-a-data-centric-security-approach/

According to Tracey E. Schelmetic (TMCnet Contributor), many small organizations with contact centers that could have improved their services to customers by using analytics were earlier forced out of competition. They were unable to bear the high capital costs of instigating such solutions unlike big companies with greater access to large amounts of data resources that have been able to use analytics solutions to run their businesses more efficiently. However today, cloud-based analytics solutions are helping even the smallest contact centers by turning all the communications with customers into useful data that can be used to provide better analytical solutions in the customer support operations thereby, leading to superior customer satisfaction ratings. Read more at: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/workforce-optimization/articles/383244-smaller-companies-reaping-large-rewards-from-contact-center.htm

 A number of companies are creating new avenues for revenue generation by thinking out of the box and encouraging amateur-made catchy videos on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This approach helps to nurture talent. Famebox, a company supported by Malaysia's Astro Group, is on a project where it aims to create "webstars" and make profits in an unconventional way, by making videos go viral so that they bring in at least a million hits. Revenue can also be generated by sharing with YouTube but it depends on the sponsorships from brands that are looking to advertise on social media. According to Kunal Rao, co-creator of The East India Comedy, the shift to online media for satire and commentary is due to the rising censorship on TV channels. To know more, read at: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-16/news/52873607_1_video-online-social-media-viral

Ideas like appointment and dimension mean lots to several public. We listen to experts asking us  to interrelate with all our admirers, that social media is concerning one-on-one communications in order to be winners. So, can big brand make social media meeting? Are the experts practice  similar for the brand with 500 admirers as for the brand with five million or more? The answer may be yes and no. The solution to the conversation has to do with level, which is the most misread concepts in advertising. level has to deal with percentage and size. When a little school tries to duplicate a social media movement by a superior school, it possibly doesn't be unsuccessful because the audiences are dissimilar in demographics, requirements, or online behavior. So what happens when we are too big to help with every admirer? The key is to range the plan and not the tactic.Read more at:http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-big-brands-build-social-media-engagement

Facebook along with market research agency GfK commissioned a study, according to which more than 60 percent of adults in the US use at least two devices every day, and more than 40% start an activity on one device and finish it on another. Facebook announced this week that it will track users' actions between devices and share with advertisers when an ad or promotion leads to a purchase. Facebook plans to capitalize on the multi-device trend. This will give marketers valuable information to make more informed advertising decisions, it does not pose any threat to users' privacy, said Rebecca Lieb, analyst at Altimeter Group. The information Facebook shares, is neither personal nor personally identifiable, she explained. Facebook is the first company to offer this type of information to marketers. Marketers can find the new cross-device conversions for campaigns within your Facebook Ad Reports. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297575/facebook-track-shopping-habits

Communication has evolved a lot since the discovery of telephones. The invention of smartphones and OTT (over the top) messenger apps, along with the emergence of social networks, have changed the face of communication. At the same time, improvements in collaborative technologies have sent video-conferencing through the early motions of commoditization, making it a reality for businesses of all sizes. Now the time has arrived to move from Unified Communications to Universal Communications. While unified communications has been focused on integration and streamlining of all the communication and collaboration tools within a business; universal communications is about making communications possible anywhere, between anyone and nearly across any device. The main factors driving the emergence of Universal communications are changing work life balances, social networking, and constantly improving devices, changing uses of synchronous vs. asynchronous and mainstreaming of the cloud. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/perspective/297528/journey-unified-universal-communications

Many instant messaging technology platforms are available today such as WhatsApp, WeChat, BBM, iMessage, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Skype which are targeted for consumers. Microsoft Lync, Cisco Jabber, etc are generally for the enterprises and have a cost linked with them. The global market is forecasted to grow from USD 267 million in 2005 to USD 1.2 billion in 2014, for enterprise instant messengers. Instant messaging by nature encourages people to be brief and to the point, which saves time. Apart from saving time, another benefit is the positive impact it has on geographically separated offices. It helps in bridging locations, encouraging new global business structures. Replacing phone calls with instant messaging also reduces cost. Many felt that instant messaging was less intrusive than a phone call due to the ability to see if a co-worker was busy or not prior to sending a message. Instant messaging also enhances the ability to multitask. IM has started to change the dynamics of Indian enterprises and helped to increase the efficiency and productivity. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/perspective/297504/instant-messengers-changing-dynamics-indian-enterprises

What are the problems faced when migrating multiple IT services to the cloud?  Inconsistent service attributes: Service attributes include security, reliability, availability, scalability, quality of service (QoS), support, and service level agreements (SLAs).  They determine how well a service will perform and how much time and energy will be required. Crosstalk: This can happen when multiple services compete for the same resource, such as bandwidth or network router processing power. Cloud services money pit: Each cloud service provider must charge a minimum monthly fee to cover its infrastructure costs which becomes excessive as the number of services and the number of providers increases. User friction frown: While single sign-on can alleviate a small portion of the redundant task "friction" caused by multiple IT services, keep in mind how much aggravation your users may experience. However moving to cloud computing can lower capital expenses, lower onsite management and upgrade costs, global service consistency, virtually unlimited scalability, and better support for remote and mobile workforces. Read more at :

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297554/headaches-multiple-cloud-services

Nowadays bridges are not inspected visually but by teams of engineers who dangle beneath the bridge on cables or look up at the bridge from an elevated work platform because it has a few problems associated with it like it is a slow, dangerous, expensive process and even the most experienced engineers can overlook cracks in the structure or other critical deficiencies. the process comes with a lot of loopholes. A new detection system has been developed by Babak Moaveni, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts School of Engineering, smart sensors which are attached permanently to bridge beams and joints, can continuously record vibrations and process the recorded signal. Changes in the vibration response can signify damage, he says. A wireless system that would use autonomous flying robots (quad-copters) to hover near the sensors and collect data while taking visual images of bridge conditions, is also being developed. The drone-like robots would transmit data to a central collection point for analysis by Moaveni in collaboration with Tufts Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Usman Khan. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297556/iot-prevent-bridges-collapsing

Today's databases should be flexible and should be able to deliver extreme performance and handle humongous data volumes. So database architects have come up with NoSQL, NewSQL alternatives to relational database management systems (RDBMS). In order to choose among these three, there has to be a fundamental understanding of all the three technologies. RDBMS can handle thousands of transactions per second but the new face of online transaction processing (OLTP) in scenarios such as real-time advertising, fraud detection, multi-player games, and risk analysis, to name a few, involves close to a million transactions per second -- a pace that traditional RDBMS has problem in dealing with. These problems can be addressed by NoSQL and NewSQL. NoSQL database management systems store data in a variety of formats. Most NoSQL products discard ACID performance to achieve data storage flexibility. NewSQL, retain both SQL and ACID, but they overcome the performance overhead of RDBMS. In order to choose the type of database the following questions have to be answered-To what extent do you rely on data in terms of storage, processing, and analysis? How important are the scale, flexibility, and performance aspects of a DBMS? What is your level of investment in incumbent technologies? Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297462/choose-nosql-newsql-rdbms

There has been a transformation in the lighting industry it is moving from fluorescent to LEDs. The Internet of Things is helping the lighting industry. Increasing efficiency in lighting would save billions of dollars as lighting consumes 461 billion kWh of electricity in a year. LEDs can provide that efficiency, along with a number of other benefits. Energy efficiency is the main force behind the industry wide transition to LEDs. Initial cost of replacing may be high but in the long run it will save substantial amount of money. This problem of high initial cost has been addressed by companies like Philips, by offering lighting-as-a-service. Philips covers the initial installation costs. But offering lighting-as-a-service for something like a commercial building creates challenges as lighting is metered with other equipment in the building  and it is difficult to measure the amount of power light is actually consuming and making cost benefit analysis somewhat  speculative. All the problems associated with lighting can be addressed with the help of Internet. One way to solve the problem is to use Power over Ethernet (PoE) networks, where the Ethernet switch provides a centralized environment where metering and monitoring can take place. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297464/iot-enables-lighting-service

Big Data is about making something out of enormous and high speed structured data as well as unstructured data, but most organizations do not have a business case for the use of Big Data and invariably, a not so conducive culture to leverage Big Data technologies. The main area of focus in India seems to be-Real Time Reporting on Transaction Systems. Through the partitioning/ clustering, distributed computing and in-memory processing methods, Big Data can run high quality real-time reports, with the ability to drive additional queries. But it will be not be the best use case for Big Data. If we focus on this use case, Information Technology will just end up being a cost center. Big Data investments should address either the fraud prevention story that helps the bottom-line, or the customer offer story that helps the top line of a company. The immediate need however is to get the data fixed to achieve the goal. Data quality continues to remain a huge challenge across more than 80 percent of the mid and large organizations. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/perspective/297428/companies-artists

Proficiency in Big Data provides a competitive advantage to banks. Banks too often depended on traditional technologies such as aggregation and normalization of data which resulted in several weaknesses like lack of flexibility in responding to upstream and downstream data changes. Data lineage may be lost after aggregation and summarization and data governance is likely weakened when several constituents retain responsibility for an extended, multi-stage data flow. These weaknesses are detrimental to the success of big data initiatives. So a new approach is required.  Big data represents a new way that banks can interact with and leverage their data. As a result, banks need to shift the paradigm for designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining big data solutions with new approaches to data storage (e.g., NoSQL databases)  and maturity of distributed-computation software frameworks (e.g., Hadoop). The approach to Big Data implementation also needs to change through rapid, iterative, and incremental deployment of solutions in a way that aligns well to the speed at which the underlying data are measured, understood, and parsed. This will take banks to an acceptable level of competency and capability. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297426/mean-banks

Huge amounts of data are being created with every passing day.The UN has called for a 'data revolution' to come up with new development goals - so that sustainable development can be better practiced and can be integrated into making decisions and also provide transparency. But finding out trends hidden within data takes skill - and so the question is whether jury is out as to whether nations and development organizations have the capacity to interpret the so-called 'big data' by themselves. The question is how best to make up the ground. The problems faced in implementing Big Data involve lack of expertise to train staff to use big data, and also awareness of the technology needed for analysis. Lack of money is another concern, particularly in developing countries. If governments do wish to see big data used for development, their best bet could be to allow the private sector to do the groundwork. In many developing countries, problems of patchy internet connections, intermittent power supplies and poor reach of high capacity cables are being faced. But the digital divide challenges may be circumvent by other sources of data, for instance, call data records (CDRs).The barriers facing big data becoming a useful tool for development are numerous and great. But, they are not insurmountable. There is reason to believe that big data can fulfil its promise in the years to come. Read more at:

http://www.scidev.net/global/data/feature/obstacles-big-data-development.html

SAP is undergoing a huge transformation, it is now focusing on empowering the customer by developing applications. SAP Labs India has developed a range of applications applicable to a variety of sectors so as to empower the cosumer;transforming from a core B2B approach to a B2B2C approach by understanding the needs of their customer's customers. The B2B2C process involves the principles of Design Thinking in conjunction with a Co-Innovation Partner to develop deep insight into the final consumer's mindset and market realities. Design Thinking is a mindset backed by a suite of tools that gives SAP Labs a powerful new way to solve problems and unlock potential. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) Network facilitates project-based co-innovation with its members which enhances the capabilities of SAP's partner and customer ecosystem through an integrated network of world-wide expertise, and best-in-class technologies and platforms. The Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C) strategy is a cultural, business and leadership imperative for SAP. With the growing importance of consumerization of technology, the focus is to understand the end-user of our systems and products where consumers ultimately determine the success of the organization. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297364/sap-bets-consumerization-focuses-b2b2c-approach

Convenience store retailers may eventually reach a point of diminishing returns and so they are trying to find out ways to use transactional promotional and loyalty data in a better manner. we could get valuable insight from Big Data by deciding what type of data streams could combine to provide insights. According to Jim Manzi of the analytics firm Applied Predictive Technologies, Arlington, VA, if retailers want to understand how certain business choices affect the bottom line, Customer Data, Transaction Log Data, Weather Information, Area Demographics and Competitor fuel pricing must be prioritized. Full-motion video from all stores, High-volume website clickstreams, and Raw Twitter feeds are less important. According to Manzi, tweeter feeds are not that important for analysis as they cannot help to out the cause and effect on key-metrics. There is a "first law of big data usefulness," said Adrian Bridgwter a contributing editor at Forbes magazine. The first law says, "The degree to which we take the exact depth of big data analytics is directly determined by the corresponding level of insight it produces and where we can still say that we gain 'productive incremental value' from doing so." Businesses like convenience stores gather a lot of information for regulatory purposes, which could ultimately be analyzed as people grow in their technological sophistication, Bridgwater said. Read more at:

http://www.cspnet.com/industry-news-analysis/technology/articles/what-first-law-big-data-usefulness

To monitor, predict, and fight wildfires like the one currently affecting the University of California at San Diego and the University of Maryland, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in the process of building an end-to-end cyber infrastructure (CI) for that challenge called WIFIRE. It is designed for real-time and data-driven simulation, prediction, and visualization. WIFIRE combines satellite data and real-time remote sensor data with various computational techniques to forecast the rate at which wildfires might spread. Many scientists, engineers, technologists, government policy makers, private companies, and firefighters are a part of the project team involved in architecture and implementation. Some prototypes and pilot applications already are available, although the project is in its first year. The vision for WIFIRE is to put in place a programmable, scalable, and reusable wildfire modeling framework. The project is part of the NSF Hazards SEES program. When fully developed, WIFIRE will be accessible to users via specialized web interfaces and alerts broadcasted to receivers before, during, and after a wildfire. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/297321/helping-tackling-wildfire-control