SigmaWay Blog

Big models and big data have long been a feature of weather and climate modelling. Computer-generated global weather forecasts are initialized from millions of diverse observations from satellites, weather balloons, surface weather stations, ships and buoys. Data assimilation, the procedure of ideally mixing these perceptions into the estimate model, is the most computationally difficult part of making a worldwide conjecture, and is a basic component of forecast skill. The international climate modelling community has evolved interesting infrastructure and social institutions that enable a diverse community of interested users to obtain standardized results from leading climate models developed around the world, to capture aspects of climate modelling certainty and uncertainty and help inform decision-makers and the interested public.

Past the thriving information administrations industry, weather has huge monetary and well-being ramifications. Weather Analytics, an organization that gives atmosphere information, evaluates that climate affects more than 33% of overall GDP, influencing the farming, tourism, angling, amusement, and air transport commercial enterprises, to name simply a few. Dubious climate conditions likewise affect little entrepreneurs. Moreover, public safety is of vital concern when officials aim to understand the impact of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, or wildfires. To know more about this aspect go through Per Nyberg (Senior Director of Business Development at Cray)’s article link: http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/3-ways-big-data-supercomputing-change-weather-forecasting/a/d-id/1269439

At this point when individuals consider saving rare species, they consider remote jungles, researchers and individuals anchoring themselves to trees. The stereotyped thought is that creatures in the wild are extremely hard to track and that the main way that individuals do this is through a basic following framework with a little specimen making presumptions for the more extensive group. Big Data and the complexities of data analysis could not be further from this, with the collection of massive data sets combined with complex predictive models and algorithms creating insights. The idea that enough data could even be collected to make a useful analysis is hard to imagine.  However, this has changed as of late as HP have collaborated with Conservation International (CI) to make Earth Insights. This system has been intended to give an early cautioning framework for creature numbers amongst jeopardized species over the world. Through the utilization of cameras and atmosphere sensors, the framework can gather information from around 1000 of these gadgets and use it to group data on population numbers. To know more about this aspect go through Dan Worth (news editor of V3)’s article link:http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2318103/hp-big-data-tools-help-wildlife-charity-save-the-planet 

With the advent of healthcare industry, the flow of data has increased by leaps and bounds. Now with the presence of analytics, huge number of unstructured data can be easily analysed to find out patterns and behaviours which in turn helps the companies associated with healthcare to take more sound and logical decisions.

To know more kindly visit:-

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/healthcare-data-goes-big-great

Recently, Tibco made an announcement to acquire Jaspersoft for some $185 million and D&B announced that it has acquired small analytics startup Indicee. This shows that companies in order to be more focused and remain valuable to customers, it is very important to provide more value through insights from big data. Please go through the link for more details: http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/04/30/suddenly-everyone-wants-to-be-in-cloud-analytics/

Many companies are trying to figure out how to make the best use of big data and which skills are most needed when trying to get useful business insights out of unstructured data. With hard technical skills, managers are also looking for some more unexpected skills too. Creativity, developer background, business intelligence expertise, data science expertise are some of the important skills which a manager looks for. To know more on this, go through the article by Colin Barker, senior reporter for ZDNet.

http://www.zdnet.com/what-skills-do-companies-really-want-on-their-big-data-team-7000025945/

When talking of Big Data, most of the times we mean business. But now, Big Data can improve your health too. Yes, it’s true.

Big Data is increasingly playing a role to modernize biomedical researches. Scientists, researchers and clinicians are leveraging the power of Big Data to generate aggregate of digital data through DNA sequencing, biomedical imaging and transforming a patient’s health record electronically.

With the help of Big Data, linkages can be found out between various genes, diseases and traits. Given that there is a huge database of genetic variants associated with diseases, like that of VARIMED, a list of gene-disease pairs can be established. This can be tracked down to the traits by developing disease – trait associations, depending on which a prediction can be made whether an individual will develop a particular disease.

To know more on how Big Data can play a role in improving our health, read at http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2014/05/how-big-data-can-improve-your-health/84904/?oref=voices-top

For emerging markets, exploring data to predict trends is not an easy option, mostly because of less availability of data in new fields. However, organizations in the emerging markets have the option of gradual progress. They have to start with analysing small data and then there will be scope to move into big data in near future. Problems for companies trying to do business in these areas are limited access to information and appropriate analytic modelling techniques. Gartner reports that companies are predicting 40 to 60% of their growth in revenues will come from emerging markets over the next decade, and McKinsey & Company predicts that in 12 years, 57% of the nearly one billion households with earnings greater than $20,000 a year will live in the developing world. "Companies need analytics to cope with these new markets," said Richard Howells, vice president of Go to Market for SAP. To know about this aspect, please visit the following link: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/start-with-small-data-in-emerging-markets-to-get-to-big-data-analytics/#. 

In a recent study it was found that more than 50% of revenue for small businesses comes from repeat customers. It is important for small businesses to retain their customers rather than acquiring new ones. Customer loyalty program is a good tool for small organizations to retain customers. Successful customer loyalty program requires authentic customer information. A digitally run and managed program will efficiently explore the data available and will in turn provide deeper insight about customers. For more details please visit the following link: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6310-big-data-customer-loyalty.html

Big data can improve sales and services by analyzing. Hence it is important for an organization to find big data and analyze the data properly. Big data can be collected through archives, documents, media, business apps, social media, public web, data storage, machine log data, and sensor data. In an article Verónica Maria Jarski discussed how Kapow software) helps an organization to find various sources of Big Data. Read more at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2014/24904/intelligence-by-variety-where-to-find-and-access-big-data-infographic

The term big data refers to large amount of customer information gathered from social media, which helps companies to improve sales and services by analyzing those data. But unfortunately small businesses have limitations while analyzing big data. Also the huge volume of data may be confusing for small organization and some time they don't know where to begin. Social platform gathers information which can be important for organisations. Hence tools provided by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, are a good start as they offer low start-up investment as per Evan Greenberg, CEO of marketing and communications firm Allscope Media. To read more about how big data can help businesses to think outside the box, follow Nicole Fallon's article in this link: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6190-smb-big-data-tips.html

When it comes to businesses and increasing their profitability, it is of no doubt that Big Data has brought in revolutionary changes. With proper handling of Big Data and data management, companies are trying to increase customer satisfaction and increase customer retention. Now, let's take a different look. 

Consider trading - capital market is one industry, where millions and millions of data float around. Regulatory bodies, banks, financial institutions store and analyze all these data that range over a large time horizon. They also need to study risk management practices and create new trading strategies. In capital market where focus has shifted from high frequency trading to discovering patterns and insights from financial data that can be used as case studies, big data can be made to its use. Financial services organizations are needed to invest in data management software that can harness the power of big data technology and extract hidden information.

How can they do so? Read them at: http://www.bankingtech.com/221932/big-data-and-data-management-in-capital-markets/ .

In a blog written by Irv Shapiro (CEO and head coach ifbyphone), we come to know the basic differences between proactive call optimization and reactive call tracking analytics. In his blog he explains how a VBMA suite has state of art technologies to deal with many impending problems that today's business organizations face with respect to call tracking etc. VBMA is used to route the call to a proper agent. The technology should be easy to use and not complex in its handling.

For more information please visit:-

In a blog written by Dr Jodie Monger, a pioneer in customer satisfaction research for the contact center industry, explains how problem arises in collecting multiple customer comments from post call IVR survey. He also explains what the problems are and how to solve those problems. 

For more information please visit:-

Human element plays an important role in successful application of big data.  Companies mainly focus on the tools (like Hadoop), using the R language, MongoDB and a few others.  But, it is also very important to understand what kind of data is available, what kind of data is needed and what role an expertise in computer science and applications, modeling, statistics, analytics play. Very often single source of big data leads to incorrect conclusion. So, human power is very much needed. To know more on this topic, go through the article link by Daniel Kusnetzky (a reformed software engineer and product manager):

http://www.zdnet.com/the-human-element-is-critical-in-applying-big-data-7000028983/

Red Hat has gathered a selection of open source software to create a Big Data development and deployment environment. It announced a software stack which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Storage, a Hadoop plug-in allowing Hadoop to process data stored using Red Hat Storage, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization etc. The company has thrown its hat into the ring to compete with and cooperate with many in the Hadoop community. To know more on this, go through the article by Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager.

http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-throws-its-hat-into-the-big-data-ring-7000011680/

The successes of big data analytics in other markets have influenced the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers are on the verge of implementing big data analytics to reduce the cost and improve the care. Hosted analytics, partnerships and collaborations, and lower-cost internal applications have opened the door for smaller organizations to use big data. As most of the providers adopted EHER, many healthcare professionals got centralized access to patient records and to manage risk, providers needed accurate data from a range of sources; hence cloud has become very significant. To know more about this topic, please visit: http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/analytics/healthcare-dives-into-big-data/d/d-id/1251138

In the 21st century with rapid development of technology and analytics, organizations claim that they are data driven and rely on customer information gathered from a diversity of sources. Data analysis provides us the effects, but fails to interpret the causes. As per Mike Mothner CEO of Wpromote "Data can tell you that this ad is better than that one, but human intuition asks why." He also said "The key to a successful, data-driven marketing strategy is finding the perfect intersection between technology and human expertise." As there is much customer information available, it is important for commercial enterprises to determine which information is relevant for processing to reach the target. For more details please visit: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6393-big-data-human-interpretation.html

Today, every company is talking about Big Data, but there is also an important thing to consider - that is organizational culture. As high technology companies are embracing Big Data, the direct beneficiaries will be their IT professionals – who will have the opportunity to outshine themselves. Companies need to look for new generation talents who can handle latest challenges keeping in tune with the advancement of Big Data technologies.  With bright futures ahead, big data can make a scope in every aspect – be it scientific research, medical science, or any data driven industry, companies and their IT professionals can see a silver line. To see increased productivity and boost profitability, what is required is the right mix of big data tools, vendor support and IT talent team.

To know how organizations can earn the feather cap by using big data analytics tools, taking alongside the cultural change, read at http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/article/big-data-analytics-success-through-cult .

Facebook released Cassandra, its NoSQL, big data distributed data store to open source. It can power massive data sets quickly and reliably without compromising performance. Different new features and improvements are included in the latest version. To know more about Cassandra 2.0, follow Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's, article link:

http://www.zdnet.com/cassandra-2-0-the-next-generation-of-big-data-7000020237/