Avalon Consulting LLC provides big data consulting services and has established partnerships with Cloudera and SAP. It focuses on NoSQL, Hadoop, and SAP HANA Vora services. Avalon helps customers build "data hubs" to aggregate data from multiple sources and apply analytics. It works with Cloudera and Hortonworks to implement Hadoop solutions and with SAP to implement SAP Vora. One of its customers, Shaw Industries, initially piloted Hadoop internally and is now working with Avalon on big data projects.
Workshop: Geert Van Grootel - Implementation of Data Governance in a Multi-in...CASRAI
Using a workshop format, this session will focus on various aspects of data governance in a research information context by using as a case study the implementation of the Data Governance in the Flanders Research Information Space (FRIS).
Lower Cost and Complexity with Azure and StorSimple Hybrid Cloud SolutionsPerficient, Inc.
Organizations today are being forced to do more with less, and the demand for scalable, reliable and secure cloud-based infrastructure and platform services is on the rise. The cloud is here to stay, and for good reason.
StorSimple is a cloud-integrated storage (CiS) product that allows you to store commonly used data on premises and put more infrequently accessed data in Azure. With a hybrid storage appliance, you can seamlessly use Azure storage without worrying about what's on premises and what's in the cloud.
In this webinar, we provided an overview of Azure's technical storage capabilities, and showed how a hybrid storage appliance like StorSimple can supply your organization with massive amounts of capacity and added functionality, all while providing disaster recovery and reducing costs by up to 50%.
Data Management for High Performance AnalyticsMary Snyder
High-performance analytics is only as good as the data management supporting it.
In fact, high-performance data management plays a key role when it comes to in-database, in-memory and in-stream analytics.
In this webinar Dan Socenau from SAS explores:
•The data management building blocks needed to succeed with high-performance analytics.
•Assessing, planning and executing these bedrock data management capabilities.
•How to deploy a modern data analysis practice.
View the on-demand webinar: http://www.sas.com/en_us/webinars/data-management-high-performance-analytics.html
Anyone can tag a document, but that is the problem. People will tag with varying degrees of accuracy, or worse still, with no accuracy. If documents are tagged accurately, then controlling and managing unstructured documents correctly is made possible. This session will review the pitfalls of manual tagging, and demonstrate the current capabilities of automatic document classification. It will also explore how intelligent metadata solutions benefit business operations, by improving migration, records management, deduplication and search.
conceptTermStoreManager – The Native SharePoint Utility to Manage Term Sets W...Concept Searching, Inc
conceptTermStoreManager is a new SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online utility that provides native integration with the SharePoint Term Store and the Managed Metadata Service application, where changes in the Term Store can easily be synchronized between SharePoint farms.
The solution was developed to overcome and solve the limitations of the SharePoint Term Store to effectively manage term sets across SharePoint farms and SharePoint Online. conceptTermStoreManager works with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, and will be available in SharePoint 2016.
This webinar will be of value to any SharePoint organization that is starting to use or currently uses the Managed Metadata Service application, and would like to resolve issues that occur when trying to manage term sets across multiple farms and environments.
The webinar is focused on the technical aspects of the utility and will contain an in-depth demonstration, exploring what conceptTermStoreManager offers:
• Direct synchronization of term sets between two environments
• Synchronization between disconnected environments via an export/import process
• Synchronization from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365
• Backup and restore of term sets using XML files
• Support for Office 365 and SharePoint Online
• Support for all SharePoint 2013 Term Store facilities
• Preservation of term GUIDs when updating existing term sets
• Identical on-premises and Office 365 Term Stores for hybrid customers
• Advanced merge options
HR Industry Spotlight: Oil & Gas. Proactively prepare for change and build a ...Nakisa
In an industry where competition for talent is high and attracting and retaining skilled workers is fundamental to business success, using an integrated organization and talent management solution is key. With the right processes and technology, you can reduce the risk and uncertainty of making critical enterprise and talent decisions by having accurate, real-time information at your finger-tips. Leveraging the simple user-interface and robust analytics, turn data into intelligence and gain confidence in the org and talent decisions you make for your enterprise.
SAS was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. It provides software for business intelligence, analytics, and data management. SAS has over 11,000 employees worldwide and annual revenue of over $3 billion. It prides itself on high-quality software and excellent customer service.
resentation of use cases of Master Data Management for Customer Data. It presents the business drivers and how Talend platform for MDM can adress them.
Workshop: Geert Van Grootel - Implementation of Data Governance in a Multi-in...CASRAI
Using a workshop format, this session will focus on various aspects of data governance in a research information context by using as a case study the implementation of the Data Governance in the Flanders Research Information Space (FRIS).
Lower Cost and Complexity with Azure and StorSimple Hybrid Cloud SolutionsPerficient, Inc.
Organizations today are being forced to do more with less, and the demand for scalable, reliable and secure cloud-based infrastructure and platform services is on the rise. The cloud is here to stay, and for good reason.
StorSimple is a cloud-integrated storage (CiS) product that allows you to store commonly used data on premises and put more infrequently accessed data in Azure. With a hybrid storage appliance, you can seamlessly use Azure storage without worrying about what's on premises and what's in the cloud.
In this webinar, we provided an overview of Azure's technical storage capabilities, and showed how a hybrid storage appliance like StorSimple can supply your organization with massive amounts of capacity and added functionality, all while providing disaster recovery and reducing costs by up to 50%.
Data Management for High Performance AnalyticsMary Snyder
High-performance analytics is only as good as the data management supporting it.
In fact, high-performance data management plays a key role when it comes to in-database, in-memory and in-stream analytics.
In this webinar Dan Socenau from SAS explores:
•The data management building blocks needed to succeed with high-performance analytics.
•Assessing, planning and executing these bedrock data management capabilities.
•How to deploy a modern data analysis practice.
View the on-demand webinar: http://www.sas.com/en_us/webinars/data-management-high-performance-analytics.html
Anyone can tag a document, but that is the problem. People will tag with varying degrees of accuracy, or worse still, with no accuracy. If documents are tagged accurately, then controlling and managing unstructured documents correctly is made possible. This session will review the pitfalls of manual tagging, and demonstrate the current capabilities of automatic document classification. It will also explore how intelligent metadata solutions benefit business operations, by improving migration, records management, deduplication and search.
conceptTermStoreManager – The Native SharePoint Utility to Manage Term Sets W...Concept Searching, Inc
conceptTermStoreManager is a new SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online utility that provides native integration with the SharePoint Term Store and the Managed Metadata Service application, where changes in the Term Store can easily be synchronized between SharePoint farms.
The solution was developed to overcome and solve the limitations of the SharePoint Term Store to effectively manage term sets across SharePoint farms and SharePoint Online. conceptTermStoreManager works with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, and will be available in SharePoint 2016.
This webinar will be of value to any SharePoint organization that is starting to use or currently uses the Managed Metadata Service application, and would like to resolve issues that occur when trying to manage term sets across multiple farms and environments.
The webinar is focused on the technical aspects of the utility and will contain an in-depth demonstration, exploring what conceptTermStoreManager offers:
• Direct synchronization of term sets between two environments
• Synchronization between disconnected environments via an export/import process
• Synchronization from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365
• Backup and restore of term sets using XML files
• Support for Office 365 and SharePoint Online
• Support for all SharePoint 2013 Term Store facilities
• Preservation of term GUIDs when updating existing term sets
• Identical on-premises and Office 365 Term Stores for hybrid customers
• Advanced merge options
HR Industry Spotlight: Oil & Gas. Proactively prepare for change and build a ...Nakisa
In an industry where competition for talent is high and attracting and retaining skilled workers is fundamental to business success, using an integrated organization and talent management solution is key. With the right processes and technology, you can reduce the risk and uncertainty of making critical enterprise and talent decisions by having accurate, real-time information at your finger-tips. Leveraging the simple user-interface and robust analytics, turn data into intelligence and gain confidence in the org and talent decisions you make for your enterprise.
SAS was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. It provides software for business intelligence, analytics, and data management. SAS has over 11,000 employees worldwide and annual revenue of over $3 billion. It prides itself on high-quality software and excellent customer service.
resentation of use cases of Master Data Management for Customer Data. It presents the business drivers and how Talend platform for MDM can adress them.
Big Data Open Source Tools and Trends: Enable Real-Time Business Intelligence...Perficient, Inc.
This document discusses big data tools and trends that enable real-time business intelligence from machine logs. It provides an overview of Perficient, a leading IT consulting firm, and introduces the speakers Eric Roch and Ben Hahn. It then covers topics like what constitutes big data, how machine data is a source of big data, and how tools like Hadoop, Storm, Elasticsearch can be used to extract insights from machine data in real-time through open source solutions and functional programming approaches like MapReduce. It also demonstrates a sample data analytics workflow using these tools.
Concept Searching, developer of automatic semantic metadata, auto-classification, and taxonomy management, has teamed with WAND, developer of industry and business function specific foundation taxonomies, to make developing, deploying, and using taxonomies simple.
Are your end users disappointed with their search results? Can they find exactly what they need, when they need it, and in the right format?
Learn how to immediately take advantage of unique multi-word concept identification capabilities to rapidly classify unstructured and semi-structured content, aligned with organizational goals and eliminating end user tagging.
This drives improved outcomes in search transparency, information governance, and collaboration across the enterprise, and further refines taxonomies and the SharePoint Term Store.
Understand how to achieve a return on your investment and get your organization’s taxonomies up and running in just two to three weeks.
• The value of this combined offering, set against traditional approaches
• What are foundation taxonomies
• How to rollout taxonomies across an organization
• Ways to manage and change taxonomies
SAS provides business intelligence software and services to help customers make better, faster decisions. Their solutions include the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform for data integration, management, and analysis, as well as industry and line-of-business specific intelligence solutions. SAS aims to give customers the power to access relevant information throughout the enterprise and improve sustainable performance. Independent analysts recognize SAS as a leader in the business intelligence market.
Coexist or Integrate? How Add-ins Deliver an Integrated Environment to Manage...Concept Searching, Inc
Concept Searching provides add-ins that allow for the integration of their automatic metadata generation technology with SharePoint to improve search and management of unstructured content. Their add-ins deliver semantic metadata without requiring custom code on SharePoint servers. Add-ins provide benefits like improved performance, stability, scalability, and easier deployment compared to traditional SharePoint customizations. Concept Searching's add-ins extract conceptual metadata and classify content to enable better search, compliance, and governance of enterprise information.
Victor Torres is a technical consultant with 19 years of experience managing projects and teams across multiple industries. He has extensive skills in databases, ETL, and data warehousing technologies. Recent projects include designing resume parsing and points calculation systems for Zero Chaos and integrating data from 5 sources into a new data warehouse for Domtar Personal Care.
The Maturity Model: Taking the Growing Pains Out of HadoopInside Analysis
The Briefing Room with Rick van der Lans and Think Big, a Teradata Company
Live Webcast on June 16, 2015
Watch the archive: https://bloorgroup.webex.com/bloorgroup/lsr.php?RCID=197f8106531874cc5c14081ca214eaff
Hadoop is arguably one of the most disruptive technologies of the last decade. Once lauded solely for its ability to transform the speed of batch processing, it has marched steadily forward and promulgated an array of performance-enhancing accessories, notably Spark and YARN. Hadoop has evolved into much more than a file system and batch processor, and it now promises to stand as the data management and analytics backbone for enterprises.
Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to learn from veteran Analyst Rick van der Lans, as he discusses the emerging roles of Hadoop within the analytics ecosystem. He’ll be briefed by Ron Bodkin of Think Big, a Teradata Company, who will explore Hadoop’s maturity spectrum, from typical entry use cases all the way up the value chain. He’ll show how enterprises that already use Hadoop in production are finding new ways to exploit its power and build creative, dynamic analytics environments.
Visit InsideAnalysis.com for more information.
The document discusses how Alation and Trifacta use machine learning to help users understand and prepare data. Alation provides data discovery and cataloging capabilities to help users find, understand, and trust data. Trifacta provides self-service data preparation tools powered by machine learning to help users clean, structure, and validate data. The combination of Alation and Trifacta allows for an open and integrated solution for data wrangling, discovery, and governance.
SAS Corporation is a global leader in business analytics software and services founded in 1976. It has over 11,000 employees worldwide and serves customers in over 100 countries. SAS develops intelligence software that helps businesses make strategic decisions from analyzing large amounts of customer data. It remains competitive through continuous investment in research and development to drive innovation. SAS prioritizes employee satisfaction and well-being through benefits and programs that promote work-life balance.
SAS Institute is a software company founded in 1976 that employs over 13,000 people globally. It takes a unique approach to organizational structure, job design, and employee incentives and retention. SAS has no formal organization chart and gives employees significant freedom and flexibility in their work. It also offers competitive compensation and benefits as well as work-life balance. This approach has resulted in very low 4% employee turnover rate, though threats include potential lack of diversity and creativity from its flat structure and individual offices.
Against the backdrop of Big Data, the Chief Data Officer, by any name, is emerging as the central player in the business of data, including cybersecurity. The MITCDOIQ Symposium explored the developing landscape, from local organizational issues to global challenges, through case studies from industry, academic, government and healthcare leaders.
Joe Caserta, president at Caserta Concepts, presented "Big Data's Impact on the Enterprise" at the MITCDOIQ Symposium.
Presentation Abstract: Organizations are challenged with managing an unprecedented volume of structured and unstructured data coming into the enterprise from a variety of verified and unverified sources. With that is the urgency to rapidly maximize value while also maintaining high data quality.
Today we start with some history and the components of data governance and information quality necessary for successful solutions. I then bring it all to life with 2 client success stories, one in healthcare and the other in banking and financial services. These case histories illustrate how accurate, complete, consistent and reliable data results in a competitive advantage and enhanced end-user and customer satisfaction.
To learn more, visit www.casertaconcepts.com
HfS Webinar Slides: The State of Outsourcing and Business Operations 2017HfS Research
View the webinar replay here: http://www.hfsresearch.com/webinars/state-of-business-operations-2017
The webinar will share the key findings of the State of Business Operations survey by HfS Research in conjunction with KPMG with 829 enterprise buyers, service providers, and advisor/consultants.
The outsourcing and shared services market has been in a seemingly endless state of flux for as long as HfS Research has existed – with the current market more confused than ever before, organizations struggling to cope with competing priorities, and confusion on the requisite timing and methods to best exploit new(ish) technologies such as process automation and evolving service delivery models.
We have seen the latest wave of change agents combine into the “digital” phenomenon, manifesting in a jumble of technology change and business drivers. Enterprises are being forced - more so than ever -to become increasingly customer-centric as they must respond to progressively complex online demands. This is driving investment in new technologies such as IoT, and analytics, and new ways of consuming, technology, and business process services – with software platforms encroaching on classic operational services.
Attend and learn:
- Changes to organizational operating and service delivery models
- The investments and directives driving operational change
- The use of shared services, outsourcing, global business services, and the impact of automation and offshoring on these service delivery models
- The maturity of business operating models linked to the use of alternative service delivery models and emerging technologies
- Adoption levels, challenges, and opportunities related to process and cognitive automation
- The effectiveness of outsourcing, above and beyond delivering cost savings, and impact on service provider selection
- Stakeholders’ current view on service providers and future expectations
- Organizational and operational talent challenges, shortages, and solutions, including automation
Presenters:
Phil Fersht – CEO & Chief Analyst, HfS Research
Jamie Snowdon – Executive Vice President, Research Operations, HfS Research
Dave Brown – Global Lead, Shared Services & Outsourcing Advisory, KPMG
Stan Lepeak – Director & Head, Research & Thought Leadership, Global Management Consulting, KPMG
This document summarizes a presentation by Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst of HfS Research, about the future of operations and the concept of the "Digital OneOffice" organization. Some key points:
- Fersht discusses the rise of intelligent automation and how it is starting to transform business processes and operations functions.
- He introduces the concept of the "Digital OneOffice", which aims to break down barriers between front, middle and back offices through standardized processes, automated and converged data, and a diverse global workforce.
- Panelists discuss challenges with implementing intelligent automation at scale, managing the partnership between enterprises and service providers, and ensuring operations careers remain appealing to younger generations by focusing on
Slides from a session at GigaCon Big Data conference in Warsaw, Poland on Jan 27, 2014. Updated with the content presented at Big Data Budapest on Aug 18, 2014.
HfS Webinar Slides: What Happened to BPO...and What Is Truly Coming Next?HfS Research
The document provides biographies and profiles of several industry leaders in business process outsourcing and IT services. In 3 sentences:
The document profiles 9 individuals including the CEOs of Genpact, Wipro, Concentrix, and HfS Research, as well as executives from IBM, KPMG, EY, and Alsbridge. It provides overviews of their careers, areas of expertise, and contact information. The profiles aim to introduce these leaders who have experience in BPO, IT services, analytics, and advisory.
Big data why big data is huge for CPG manufacturersJanet Dorenkott
CPG manufacturers need to understand big data and understand the value of big data. This presentation explains big data, the evolution of big data and how big data can be used.
Driving SAP upgrade or consolidation success with harmonized material mastersVerdantis Inc.
Only 25% of ERP projects generate the projected ROI. Key reasons for this include bad data or under-governance of once-harmonized data. If you are planning a SAP system consolidation, or upgrade (or have just completed one), understanding the value of harmonized material masters might just be that winning stroke.
It’s no wonder that best practice experts always recommend standardizing and harmonizing material master data during an SAP/ERP upgrade. Using enriched, rationalized, and harmonized data to fuel the ERP has measurable impact on ROI from an SAP implementation. Watch this educational presentation to learn how you can use ‘always-harmonized’ material data as a partner to ensure the best possible results from your SAP upgrade or consolidation.
HfS Webinar Slides: 2017, the year of making it realHfS Research
This document provides an overview of the research practice areas and key themes for 2017 for analysts at HfS Research, an analyst firm focused on business operations and IT services. The analysts' practice areas include intelligent automation, analytics services, HR technology, blockchain, and vertical industries like healthcare and manufacturing. Major themes for 2017 include the impact of technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and blockchain. Key research projects for 2017 include blueprints on intelligent automation, analytics in healthcare, and the intelligent OneOffice operating model.
Intelligent Compliance to Optimize Energy Sector Enterprise Content Managemen...Concept Searching, Inc
We explored how SharePoint can be enhanced to establish an ECM framework that ensures the availability, usability, integrity, and security of an enterprise’s information, and enables information consumers to:
• Find trusted and relevant information regarding health and safety, asset maintenance, and compliance guidelines such as OSHA, for key information for decision making
• Ensure accurate records management, regulatory compliance, and improve eDiscovery, and litigation support processes
• Identify and secure potential confidential or sensitive information exposures
• Rapidly address unexpected failures in processes, such as pipeline leaks or natural disasters
• Enable multinational content asset protection and authorization to assets
• Automate application and enforcement of policies
• Quickly react to deploy project-based hybrid cloud and on-premise collaborative solutions
How PepsiCo's Big Data Strategy is Disrupting CPG Retail AnalyticsHortonworks
Like all consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, PepsiCo relies on huge volumes of data to accurately replenish its retailers with the appropriate amount and type of product. Across the CPG industry, most analysts exclusively rely on Excel and Access for data wrangling, but as PepsiCo’s data surpassed the capabilities of those tools, they knew they needed a better way.
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/227935
HfS Webinar Slides: The Great Roboboss DebateHfS Research
Welcome to the completely unsponsored, unvarnished HfS web debate on the future of the "Roboboss". Join an interstellar panel consisting of client leaders, technologists, service providers, analysts and advisors to discuss how to approach the impact of Cognitive Computing and Intelligent Automation on enterprises as it moves up the value chain.
Learn about:
• How should we define what a "Roboboss" is... and should be?
• How far from reality are today's viewpoints from other "experts" - what's real and what's fantasy?
• Do we need a Code of Ethics for Intelligent Automation and Cognitive?
• Where are we going to see “real Cognitive applications” in the short-medium term?
• Where should we start our Intelligent Automation and Cognitive journey?
• Are today’s service providers really going to be the enablers of Intelligent Automation and Cognitive?
• Buyers - if you could start this all over again, what would you do differently?
• How can we develop “Cogno-boss” skills?
• What is the Real Endgame with Intelligent Automation and Cognitive?
Client Leaders:
• Lee Coulter, CEO Shared Services, Ascension Health
• Matthew Heffron, VP Innovation Initiatives, Wells Fargo
Advisors, Analysts and Professors:
• Mary Lacity, Curators' Distinguished Professor, UMSL
• Cliff Justice, Partner and Innovation/Cognitive Lead, KPMG
• Dr. Thomas Reuner, Research VP, HfS Research
Provider and ISV Leaders:
• Chitra Dorai, IBM Fellow & CTO Cognitive Services, IBM Watson
• Mihir Shukla, CEO, Automation Anywhere
• Chetan Dube, CEO, IPSoft
• Alastair Bathgate, CEO, Blue Prism
View the webinar recording: http://www.hfsresearch.com/pointsofview/hfs-webinar-the-great-robot-debate
Nadeem Douba, GWAPT, GPEN currently situated in the Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) valley, Nadeem provides technical security consulting services primarily to clients in the health, education, and public sectors. Nadeem has been involved within the security community for over ten years and has frequently presented talks in his local ISSA chapter, and most recently at DEF CON 20 on the topics of Open Source Intelligence and mobile security. He is also an active member of the open source software community and has contributed to projects such as libnet, Backtrack, and Maltego.
Big Data Open Source Tools and Trends: Enable Real-Time Business Intelligence...Perficient, Inc.
This document discusses big data tools and trends that enable real-time business intelligence from machine logs. It provides an overview of Perficient, a leading IT consulting firm, and introduces the speakers Eric Roch and Ben Hahn. It then covers topics like what constitutes big data, how machine data is a source of big data, and how tools like Hadoop, Storm, Elasticsearch can be used to extract insights from machine data in real-time through open source solutions and functional programming approaches like MapReduce. It also demonstrates a sample data analytics workflow using these tools.
Concept Searching, developer of automatic semantic metadata, auto-classification, and taxonomy management, has teamed with WAND, developer of industry and business function specific foundation taxonomies, to make developing, deploying, and using taxonomies simple.
Are your end users disappointed with their search results? Can they find exactly what they need, when they need it, and in the right format?
Learn how to immediately take advantage of unique multi-word concept identification capabilities to rapidly classify unstructured and semi-structured content, aligned with organizational goals and eliminating end user tagging.
This drives improved outcomes in search transparency, information governance, and collaboration across the enterprise, and further refines taxonomies and the SharePoint Term Store.
Understand how to achieve a return on your investment and get your organization’s taxonomies up and running in just two to three weeks.
• The value of this combined offering, set against traditional approaches
• What are foundation taxonomies
• How to rollout taxonomies across an organization
• Ways to manage and change taxonomies
SAS provides business intelligence software and services to help customers make better, faster decisions. Their solutions include the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform for data integration, management, and analysis, as well as industry and line-of-business specific intelligence solutions. SAS aims to give customers the power to access relevant information throughout the enterprise and improve sustainable performance. Independent analysts recognize SAS as a leader in the business intelligence market.
Coexist or Integrate? How Add-ins Deliver an Integrated Environment to Manage...Concept Searching, Inc
Concept Searching provides add-ins that allow for the integration of their automatic metadata generation technology with SharePoint to improve search and management of unstructured content. Their add-ins deliver semantic metadata without requiring custom code on SharePoint servers. Add-ins provide benefits like improved performance, stability, scalability, and easier deployment compared to traditional SharePoint customizations. Concept Searching's add-ins extract conceptual metadata and classify content to enable better search, compliance, and governance of enterprise information.
Victor Torres is a technical consultant with 19 years of experience managing projects and teams across multiple industries. He has extensive skills in databases, ETL, and data warehousing technologies. Recent projects include designing resume parsing and points calculation systems for Zero Chaos and integrating data from 5 sources into a new data warehouse for Domtar Personal Care.
The Maturity Model: Taking the Growing Pains Out of HadoopInside Analysis
The Briefing Room with Rick van der Lans and Think Big, a Teradata Company
Live Webcast on June 16, 2015
Watch the archive: https://bloorgroup.webex.com/bloorgroup/lsr.php?RCID=197f8106531874cc5c14081ca214eaff
Hadoop is arguably one of the most disruptive technologies of the last decade. Once lauded solely for its ability to transform the speed of batch processing, it has marched steadily forward and promulgated an array of performance-enhancing accessories, notably Spark and YARN. Hadoop has evolved into much more than a file system and batch processor, and it now promises to stand as the data management and analytics backbone for enterprises.
Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to learn from veteran Analyst Rick van der Lans, as he discusses the emerging roles of Hadoop within the analytics ecosystem. He’ll be briefed by Ron Bodkin of Think Big, a Teradata Company, who will explore Hadoop’s maturity spectrum, from typical entry use cases all the way up the value chain. He’ll show how enterprises that already use Hadoop in production are finding new ways to exploit its power and build creative, dynamic analytics environments.
Visit InsideAnalysis.com for more information.
The document discusses how Alation and Trifacta use machine learning to help users understand and prepare data. Alation provides data discovery and cataloging capabilities to help users find, understand, and trust data. Trifacta provides self-service data preparation tools powered by machine learning to help users clean, structure, and validate data. The combination of Alation and Trifacta allows for an open and integrated solution for data wrangling, discovery, and governance.
SAS Corporation is a global leader in business analytics software and services founded in 1976. It has over 11,000 employees worldwide and serves customers in over 100 countries. SAS develops intelligence software that helps businesses make strategic decisions from analyzing large amounts of customer data. It remains competitive through continuous investment in research and development to drive innovation. SAS prioritizes employee satisfaction and well-being through benefits and programs that promote work-life balance.
SAS Institute is a software company founded in 1976 that employs over 13,000 people globally. It takes a unique approach to organizational structure, job design, and employee incentives and retention. SAS has no formal organization chart and gives employees significant freedom and flexibility in their work. It also offers competitive compensation and benefits as well as work-life balance. This approach has resulted in very low 4% employee turnover rate, though threats include potential lack of diversity and creativity from its flat structure and individual offices.
Against the backdrop of Big Data, the Chief Data Officer, by any name, is emerging as the central player in the business of data, including cybersecurity. The MITCDOIQ Symposium explored the developing landscape, from local organizational issues to global challenges, through case studies from industry, academic, government and healthcare leaders.
Joe Caserta, president at Caserta Concepts, presented "Big Data's Impact on the Enterprise" at the MITCDOIQ Symposium.
Presentation Abstract: Organizations are challenged with managing an unprecedented volume of structured and unstructured data coming into the enterprise from a variety of verified and unverified sources. With that is the urgency to rapidly maximize value while also maintaining high data quality.
Today we start with some history and the components of data governance and information quality necessary for successful solutions. I then bring it all to life with 2 client success stories, one in healthcare and the other in banking and financial services. These case histories illustrate how accurate, complete, consistent and reliable data results in a competitive advantage and enhanced end-user and customer satisfaction.
To learn more, visit www.casertaconcepts.com
HfS Webinar Slides: The State of Outsourcing and Business Operations 2017HfS Research
View the webinar replay here: http://www.hfsresearch.com/webinars/state-of-business-operations-2017
The webinar will share the key findings of the State of Business Operations survey by HfS Research in conjunction with KPMG with 829 enterprise buyers, service providers, and advisor/consultants.
The outsourcing and shared services market has been in a seemingly endless state of flux for as long as HfS Research has existed – with the current market more confused than ever before, organizations struggling to cope with competing priorities, and confusion on the requisite timing and methods to best exploit new(ish) technologies such as process automation and evolving service delivery models.
We have seen the latest wave of change agents combine into the “digital” phenomenon, manifesting in a jumble of technology change and business drivers. Enterprises are being forced - more so than ever -to become increasingly customer-centric as they must respond to progressively complex online demands. This is driving investment in new technologies such as IoT, and analytics, and new ways of consuming, technology, and business process services – with software platforms encroaching on classic operational services.
Attend and learn:
- Changes to organizational operating and service delivery models
- The investments and directives driving operational change
- The use of shared services, outsourcing, global business services, and the impact of automation and offshoring on these service delivery models
- The maturity of business operating models linked to the use of alternative service delivery models and emerging technologies
- Adoption levels, challenges, and opportunities related to process and cognitive automation
- The effectiveness of outsourcing, above and beyond delivering cost savings, and impact on service provider selection
- Stakeholders’ current view on service providers and future expectations
- Organizational and operational talent challenges, shortages, and solutions, including automation
Presenters:
Phil Fersht – CEO & Chief Analyst, HfS Research
Jamie Snowdon – Executive Vice President, Research Operations, HfS Research
Dave Brown – Global Lead, Shared Services & Outsourcing Advisory, KPMG
Stan Lepeak – Director & Head, Research & Thought Leadership, Global Management Consulting, KPMG
This document summarizes a presentation by Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst of HfS Research, about the future of operations and the concept of the "Digital OneOffice" organization. Some key points:
- Fersht discusses the rise of intelligent automation and how it is starting to transform business processes and operations functions.
- He introduces the concept of the "Digital OneOffice", which aims to break down barriers between front, middle and back offices through standardized processes, automated and converged data, and a diverse global workforce.
- Panelists discuss challenges with implementing intelligent automation at scale, managing the partnership between enterprises and service providers, and ensuring operations careers remain appealing to younger generations by focusing on
Slides from a session at GigaCon Big Data conference in Warsaw, Poland on Jan 27, 2014. Updated with the content presented at Big Data Budapest on Aug 18, 2014.
HfS Webinar Slides: What Happened to BPO...and What Is Truly Coming Next?HfS Research
The document provides biographies and profiles of several industry leaders in business process outsourcing and IT services. In 3 sentences:
The document profiles 9 individuals including the CEOs of Genpact, Wipro, Concentrix, and HfS Research, as well as executives from IBM, KPMG, EY, and Alsbridge. It provides overviews of their careers, areas of expertise, and contact information. The profiles aim to introduce these leaders who have experience in BPO, IT services, analytics, and advisory.
Big data why big data is huge for CPG manufacturersJanet Dorenkott
CPG manufacturers need to understand big data and understand the value of big data. This presentation explains big data, the evolution of big data and how big data can be used.
Driving SAP upgrade or consolidation success with harmonized material mastersVerdantis Inc.
Only 25% of ERP projects generate the projected ROI. Key reasons for this include bad data or under-governance of once-harmonized data. If you are planning a SAP system consolidation, or upgrade (or have just completed one), understanding the value of harmonized material masters might just be that winning stroke.
It’s no wonder that best practice experts always recommend standardizing and harmonizing material master data during an SAP/ERP upgrade. Using enriched, rationalized, and harmonized data to fuel the ERP has measurable impact on ROI from an SAP implementation. Watch this educational presentation to learn how you can use ‘always-harmonized’ material data as a partner to ensure the best possible results from your SAP upgrade or consolidation.
HfS Webinar Slides: 2017, the year of making it realHfS Research
This document provides an overview of the research practice areas and key themes for 2017 for analysts at HfS Research, an analyst firm focused on business operations and IT services. The analysts' practice areas include intelligent automation, analytics services, HR technology, blockchain, and vertical industries like healthcare and manufacturing. Major themes for 2017 include the impact of technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and blockchain. Key research projects for 2017 include blueprints on intelligent automation, analytics in healthcare, and the intelligent OneOffice operating model.
Intelligent Compliance to Optimize Energy Sector Enterprise Content Managemen...Concept Searching, Inc
We explored how SharePoint can be enhanced to establish an ECM framework that ensures the availability, usability, integrity, and security of an enterprise’s information, and enables information consumers to:
• Find trusted and relevant information regarding health and safety, asset maintenance, and compliance guidelines such as OSHA, for key information for decision making
• Ensure accurate records management, regulatory compliance, and improve eDiscovery, and litigation support processes
• Identify and secure potential confidential or sensitive information exposures
• Rapidly address unexpected failures in processes, such as pipeline leaks or natural disasters
• Enable multinational content asset protection and authorization to assets
• Automate application and enforcement of policies
• Quickly react to deploy project-based hybrid cloud and on-premise collaborative solutions
How PepsiCo's Big Data Strategy is Disrupting CPG Retail AnalyticsHortonworks
Like all consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, PepsiCo relies on huge volumes of data to accurately replenish its retailers with the appropriate amount and type of product. Across the CPG industry, most analysts exclusively rely on Excel and Access for data wrangling, but as PepsiCo’s data surpassed the capabilities of those tools, they knew they needed a better way.
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/227935
HfS Webinar Slides: The Great Roboboss DebateHfS Research
Welcome to the completely unsponsored, unvarnished HfS web debate on the future of the "Roboboss". Join an interstellar panel consisting of client leaders, technologists, service providers, analysts and advisors to discuss how to approach the impact of Cognitive Computing and Intelligent Automation on enterprises as it moves up the value chain.
Learn about:
• How should we define what a "Roboboss" is... and should be?
• How far from reality are today's viewpoints from other "experts" - what's real and what's fantasy?
• Do we need a Code of Ethics for Intelligent Automation and Cognitive?
• Where are we going to see “real Cognitive applications” in the short-medium term?
• Where should we start our Intelligent Automation and Cognitive journey?
• Are today’s service providers really going to be the enablers of Intelligent Automation and Cognitive?
• Buyers - if you could start this all over again, what would you do differently?
• How can we develop “Cogno-boss” skills?
• What is the Real Endgame with Intelligent Automation and Cognitive?
Client Leaders:
• Lee Coulter, CEO Shared Services, Ascension Health
• Matthew Heffron, VP Innovation Initiatives, Wells Fargo
Advisors, Analysts and Professors:
• Mary Lacity, Curators' Distinguished Professor, UMSL
• Cliff Justice, Partner and Innovation/Cognitive Lead, KPMG
• Dr. Thomas Reuner, Research VP, HfS Research
Provider and ISV Leaders:
• Chitra Dorai, IBM Fellow & CTO Cognitive Services, IBM Watson
• Mihir Shukla, CEO, Automation Anywhere
• Chetan Dube, CEO, IPSoft
• Alastair Bathgate, CEO, Blue Prism
View the webinar recording: http://www.hfsresearch.com/pointsofview/hfs-webinar-the-great-robot-debate
Nadeem Douba, GWAPT, GPEN currently situated in the Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) valley, Nadeem provides technical security consulting services primarily to clients in the health, education, and public sectors. Nadeem has been involved within the security community for over ten years and has frequently presented talks in his local ISSA chapter, and most recently at DEF CON 20 on the topics of Open Source Intelligence and mobile security. He is also an active member of the open source software community and has contributed to projects such as libnet, Backtrack, and Maltego.
The document provides an overview of a presentation on web penetration testing and hacking tools. It discusses what will and will not be covered, including demonstrations of tools like sqlmap, BeEF, and Metasploit used against vulnerable web apps. It also summarizes recent security events like Heartbleed and Shellshock, the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities, and techniques for SQL injection, XSS attacks, and exploiting vulnerabilities like those in ColdFusion.
This document provides an overview of several tools available in Kali Linux for reconnaissance and vulnerability analysis during an ethical hacking test. It describes popular tools for information gathering like Maltego and Nmap, which can identify hosts, services, and vulnerabilities. It also covers vulnerability scanners such as OpenVAS, W3af, Nikto, Vega, OWASP ZAP, and Burp Suite that detect flaws in networks, systems, and web applications. The document aims to help ethical hackers effectively use these tools to test systems according to the responsibilities and expectations of their customers.
OWASP Top 10 Web Application VulnerabilitiesSoftware Guru
This document provides an overview of the OWASP Top 10 Risk Rating Methodology. It explains how risks are rated based on four factors: threat agent, attack vector, technical impact, and business impact. Each factor is given a rating of 1-3 (easy to difficult) and these ratings are multiplied together to calculate an overall weighted risk rating. An example of how this methodology would be applied to an SQL injection vulnerability is also provided.
Surachai Chatchalermpun has several cybersecurity certifications including the CEH, ECSA, and GPEN. He is certified in ethical hacking and penetration testing by EC-Council and SANS GIAC. Additionally, he holds certifications from OSSTMM and Mile2 that demonstrate his expertise in security testing methodologies and as a certified penetration testing engineer.
Alphorm.com Formation Hacking et Sécurité , avancéAlphorm
Formation complète ici :
http://www.alphorm.com/tutoriel/formation-en-ligne-hacking-et-securite-avance
Cette formation Hacking & Sécurité, Avancé est une approche avancée des pratiques et des méthodologies utilisées par les hackers dans le cadre d’intrusion dans des réseaux et des applications. C’est la suite de la première formation l’essentiel du Hacking & Sécurité.
Durant cette formation Hacking & Sécurité, Avancé nous mettons l’accent sur la compréhension technique et pratique des différentes formes d’attaques existantes, en se tardant sur les vulnérabilités les plus critiques : Social engineering, Dénis de service, le Fuzzing, les Botnets, Attaques Server-Side, Le Brute Force, Le cracking de mot de passe, Attaques Client-Side, MiTM Proxy, Elévation de privilège, Attaques Web, Attaques sur les réseaux sans fils, Bypassing HSSI, Bypassing MAC adress Authentication, Attaque WEP, Attaque WPA et WPA2, Clonage de points d'accès, L'attaque DoS.
A la fin de cette formation Hacking & Sécurité, Avancé vous serez capable de réaliser des audits de sécurité (test de pénétration) avancés au sein d’une infrastructure, tester la sécurité des réseaux sans fils ainsi que préparer un rapport sur vos activités avec des outils professionnels dédiés.
Comme dans la formation l’essentiel du Hacking & Sécurité cette formation Hacking & Sécurité, Avancé sera axée sur un lab détaillé et complet pour mettre toutes les techniques en pratiques.
Aussi vous pouvez télécharger pleines de ressources et outils en annexe de cette formation.
How SAP cloud Analytics enables Integrated Planning Across All Enterprise Activities. This eBook provides an in-depth look at how the SAP Cloud Analytics platform can be leveraged to provide flexible, integrated Cloud Planning processes across a wide range of enterprise functional areas.
The document discusses SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which is SAP's platform-as-a-service offering. It provides everything needed to build enterprise applications in the cloud, including integration, APIs, analytics, user experience, IoT, security, collaboration, development and operations capabilities. It allows customers to increase business speed and agility by extending SAP solutions to hybrid landscapes. Example use cases and customer stories are also presented to illustrate how Walmart and EnterpriseJungle have leveraged SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
Why Businesses Need to Dive into Using SAP Cloud Platform.pdfTechwave Consulting
The world of SAP cloud platform services is vast and exciting. With SAP's extensive range of capabilities, including analytics, business services, data and storage, DevOps, integration services, IoT, machine learning, runtimes and containers, security, and user experience, the possibilities are endless.
When it comes to SAP cloud platform integration, the flexibility is remarkable. You have the power to develop and customize existing applications, whether they reside in the cloud or on-premise infrastructure. This makes it an ideal choice for hybrid cloud environments. In addition to personalized and development-oriented services, SAP enables you to leverage your organization's existing skills to build and deploy applications, empowering your business with agility.
Discover the potential of SAP cloud platform services and unlock new horizons for your organization's growth and innovation.
The document discusses the benefits of a complete, unified cloud over separate siloed providers. It argues that a complete cloud with integrated applications across functions like HR, sales, marketing, finance, etc. allows for better data sharing, reduced costs and complexity, and increased security compared to using multiple cloud providers. The document then describes Oracle's cloud platform and suite of applications as providing a modern, complete cloud designed to grow with businesses and speed their transition to the cloud. Key benefits highlighted include unified access to data, built-in best practices, global security and compliance, and the ability to personalize the cloud experience.
YASH Technologies helps organizations to determine the value of big data to their bottom line. We can help address how to capture, store, correlate, analyse, search, visualize, and share data in ways your organization demands.
YASH Technologies helps organizations to determine the value of big data to their bottom line. We can help address how to capture, store, correlate, analyse, search, visualize, and share data in ways your organization demands.
Cloudway is an expert in SAP S/4HANA implementation and cloud integration services. It helps clients streamline business processes and implement S/4HANA through its experienced team and global delivery model. Cloudway focuses on simplifying processes and providing real-time insights through S/4HANA implementations. It also collaborates with technology partners to deliver innovative cloud-based solutions.
The document discusses SAP HANA, an in-memory database that provides faster processing of large amounts of data. It outlines the need for SAP HANA to enable real-time analytics and insights. It then describes how SAP HANA works and some of its key capabilities like processing large data sets very quickly. The document shares several examples of SAP HANA deployments at Deloitte that have delivered business benefits across industries. It concludes by providing Deloitte contacts for SAP HANA services.
SAP HANA is an in-memory computing appliance that combines SAP database software with pre-tuned server, storage, and networking hardware to deliver - allowing actionable insight and decision making on Big Data.
If your organization runs on SAP we recommend you take a few minutes to read this document. It presents a set of Enterprise Information Management challenges and how they can be addressed with top leader OpenText solutions.
Investment Thesis Rodney Nelson, Eq. Analyst, 19 September 2.docxchristiandean12115
Investment Thesis
Rodney Nelson, Eq. Analyst, 19 September 2016
Oracle is at a crossroads, in our view. The rise of cloud
computing and open-source software over the last two
decades has caught the software giant somewhat
flat-footed, leaving the firm in scramble mode as it races
its peers to the cloud. While many of the company’s
products are under siege, we think the firm can maintain
its status near the top of the software food chain.
The relational database has long been the foundation of
Oracle’s fortress, upon which the company built its
middleware and application software businesses.
However, as enterprises increasingly look to lower total
cost of IT ownership, the once-fruitful economics of
infrastructure software have been compromised by
open-source alternatives. Oracle’s database business
remains a behemoth, but as workloads increasingly move
to the cloud, enterprises are abandoning the costly license
and support model of the past for subscriptions to more
cost-effective (and increasingly versatile) solutions. We
think this trend will erode Oracle’s prolific database
business over time, though not all is lost. The company’s
open-source MySQL solution has rapidly gained
prominence in the cloud, albeit at fractional pricing
relative to the company’s legacy database technology. We
think Oracle’s database can remain a functional business,
though it shouldn’t be relied upon to carry the business
forward.
Oracle’s pivot to the cloud has been heavily-publicized,
but the firm has begun to deliver meaningful results that
should reinforce customer switching costs. The company
undertook the onerous task of rewriting the source code
of its flagship applications for the software-as-a-service
(SaaS) delivery model over a decade ago. Those efforts
are beginning to bear fruit, and the firm continues to invest
heavily in both existing and new software solutions to
ensure Oracle customers don’t depart for SaaS rivals.
While we have some concerns that Oracle's cloud
migration will become increasingly complex in the short
term in light of recent acquisitions and the firm's generally
late move into the cloud, we ultimately believe Oracle can
retain its wide moat by retaining the bulk of its application
Important Disclosure: The conduct of Morningstar's analysts is governed by Morningstar's Code of Ethics, Securities Trading and Disclosure Policy,
and Investment Research Integrity Policy. For information regarding conflicts of interest, please click http://corporate1.morningstar.com/US/Equity-
Disclosures/
We think Oracle has its work cut out for itself as it plays catch-up in the
cloud.
Bulls Say
ODespite a late start, Oracle has made the
necessary investments to ensure its application
software will thrive in a cloud-based environment,
which should lock customers in over the long-run.
OOracle has made a bevy of savvy acquisitions to
expand its vertical-specific software portfolio,
applications that we believe boast meaningful
switching costs.
.
GoFusion is a software focused IT company having its corporate office in Delhi NCR and base in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Indonesia. We have our exclusive focus on services around Oracle product portfolio that includes oracle apps and technology related services, Enterprise product development, Implementation, migration and Integration.
How does SAP Analytics Cloud Drive Desired Business Outcomes_.pdfAnil
Did you know that despite rampant digitalization, many organizations still largely rely on spreadsheets to perform high-level financial planning and analysis?
Integration services at yash increase the value of sap investments with share...YASH Technologies
YASH Technologies provides world-class SharePoint and SAP integration services that extend critical data and actions available from SAP enterprise applications through to Microsoft SharePoint.
The document discusses how real-time analytics can help organizations gain insights from data and make decisions. It provides examples of how the State of Indiana used SAP tools like HANA and Lumira to analyze health data and reduce infant mortality. SAP promotes a closed-loop decision support approach to connect analytics insights to planning, performance monitoring, and risk management. The document also describes how SAP's cloud and on-premise products like S/4HANA provide a path for organizations to adopt a real-time analytics mindset.
Connect, Transform and Reimagine- Help your customers take advantage of Inter...SAP OEM
Capitalize on Internet of things opportunities by partnering with SAP . As IoT connects people and businesses to everything else, the Internet of Things will become the very fabric that supports a new, networked economy. Adding intelligence to this ever-expanding network of connected devices offers huge opportunities and the potential to create tangible value for your customers in a number of ways.
ISV- Connect, Transform and Reimagine- Help your customers take advantage of ...Shivakumar Vishwanath
Capitalize on Internet of things opportunities by partnering with SAP . As IoT connects people and businesses to everything else, the Internet of Things will become the very fabric that supports a new, networked economy. Adding intelligence to this ever-expanding network of connected devices offers huge opportunities and the potential to create tangible value for your customers in a number of ways.
Journey to Marketing Data Lake [BRK1098]Sumit Sarkar
The challenge this session’s speaker and his colleagues faced in trying to learn more about customer experiences was that insights are fragmented across different systems such as Oracle Eloqua, CRM, and web analytics. To better understand their contacts, they started with the corporate data warehouse, which was missing a lot of this lower-value and detailed data. When they considered expanding the data warehouse, it was difficult to define what questions they wanted to answer in advance, because it varies for each campaign they run. Thus they embarked on building a Hadoop-based data lake, for the flexibility to ask any questions with an ad hoc schema on read approach, against any customer data sets in varying levels of detail, to better understand what their visitors want to consume.
Breakout Session
Wednesday, Apr 26, 5:45 p.m. | Mandalay Bay D
https://oracle.rainfocus.com/scripts/catalog/oracleCx17.jsp?search=BRK1098
Similar to 451 Research Report on Avalon Big Data Capabilities - 2017 (20)
2. Avalon Consulting LLC was founded in 2003 to provide systems integration consulting to large enter-
prises with a focus on portal-based web applications and content management systems. Avalon initially
focused on high-end platforms offered by Vignette (CMS, web portal) and Autonomy (enterprise search).
By 2009, it had dozens of Fortune 500 clients, and began investing in a NoSQL delivery capability based
on the needs of its client base. In 2010, it began offering services around Hadoop, and refocused its
enterprise search capabilities around both Elasticsearch and Solr. The company has now taken all these
technologies and added new consulting services to its capabilities. This report focuses on the develop-
ment of its NoSQL, Hadoop and SAP HANA Vora services.
THE 451 TAKE
Over the past couple of years, Avalon has worked hard to establish itself as one of the rising stars of the big-
data consultancy market. Its focus on mentoring, and its investment in its big-data Center of Excellence in
Austin, Texas, are paying off in terms of customer wins and in establishing new strong, strategic partnerships
with both Cloudera and SAP. To manage the next phase of its growth, it needs to put more structured sales
and marketing processes in place and create software assets, building on its strength in packaged scenarios
for extracting data from data lakes.
CO NTEXT
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Avalon has 75 employees, and goes to market organized by geography, with five offices
across the US in Plano, Austin, Washington DC, Chicago/Minneapolis/St Louis (Midwest) and Boulder, Colorado. The com-
pany is internally funded, and its expertise is structured around four practices: analytics, search, digital asset manage-
ment, and big data and NoSQL.
One of the main operational initiatives the company has undertaken over the past 18 months is to pivot more toward di-
rect client engagement, rather than only sub-contracting through vendors such as Hortonworks and MarkLogic. To date,
it has won a dozen or so direct clients, and now has Master Service Agreements in place with 10 of the top 75 Fortune 500
companies.
TECHNO LOGY SERVICES
NOSQL SERVICES
As the market transitions from RDBMS to use of NoSQL, there is an increased requirement to tie these systems together in
order to aggregate data.The challenge tends to be that organizations struggle to scale beyond three to four data sources.
Customers understand that they need to correlate data for analytics, but don’t necessarily want to create an entire data
lake. So Avalon’s structured approach is to build a data hub.
To do this, Avalon works with customers to understand what they are trying to derive as the end result, and then creates a
centerpiece to achieve this that ties RDBMS and NoSQL sources together. Taking this approach, the company has worked
with Fortune 50 companies in media and logistics, bringing together 60-70 sources across many operating companies
that do not speak the exact same language. In media, Avalon has worked with legal and content professionals that do
not use the same professional terms, and has created a common set of semantics to ensure that legal work is not being
duplicated.
Avalon uses off-the-shelf products – such as MarkLogic (from which it has received Partner of the Year, Innovator of the
Year and Partner Excellence awards), Couchbase, Cassandra and Redis – and applies them in a customized way as a data
hub bringing together relational, flat and NoSQL solutions so that rational business decisions can be made using analyti-
cal offerings across organizations.
451 RESEARCH REPRINT
3. 451 RESEARCH REPRINT
One thing the consultancy has found is that many organizations do not have the modeling skills required be-
hind the semantic network to deliver results. Organizations cannot just tie data together, they need to create a
knowledge database to model the data, and they also need to understand how the semantics connect it all. The
data must be indexed and stored in an aggregated manner, and this is where Avalon’s data hub approach proves
beneficial.
HADOOP CONSULTING GROUP
Avalon’s Hadoop Consulting Group is technology-focused, but is always helping customers think about how they
can create competitive advantage using data. As VP Hadoop Practice Leader Tony Jewitt puts it, “Companies can
create new applications based on new data sources and [they] want to know what technologies are helpful – after
all, Hadoop is a collection of about 30 separate Apache open source projects to store and process data. We are
demystifying the Hadoop ecosystem for our customers.”
Avalon has been working with big data for five years, and partners with third-party Hadoop distributors. A primary
use case of interest to customers is SQL on Hadoop, performing lots of structured data analytics with Hadoop. To
do this, Avalon works with a RDBMS under the hood (such as Postgres) so that a search engine can be run on the
Hadoop cluster. This requires the consultancy to work with the client to address data governance and security
requirements, selecting the right approach and technologies depending upon the type of data, such as big batch,
interactive or streamed data.
Originally focused on Hortonworks, the Hadoop Consulting Group has also developed a partnership with Clou-
dera over the past year or so. 451 Research spoke with Cloudera’s regional sales leader of South Central US, Dean
Patton, who manages the relationship with Avalon.“Having a community of specialized SI partners such as Avalon
is critically important for Cloudera to provide regional customers with the broadest range of capabilities and rates
than what many of the global SIs can offer.”
After the first project that Cloudera and Avalon worked on together, Avalon rose to become one of Cloudera’s
most trusted partners in the region. According to Patton, the consultancy has a very strong management team
that invests a large amount of time to attract and maintain talent, especially in its Center of Excellence office in
Austin.
Cloudera is very selective about the partners it works with, and Patton says that it is unfortunately common in the
Hadoop space for systems integrators to occasionally overinflate their capabilities around this complex architec-
ture. Cloudera says it has always found Avalon to have strong architectural skills and deliver excellent services. As a
result, Patton trusts Avalon as a business partner to the extent of making fiscal-year plans and discussing pipelines
to help it make better staffing decisions.
SAP HANA VORA
Avalon has recently become a service partner for SAP, adding SAP Vora (SAP’s SQL-on-Hadoop offering) to its
portfolio of big-data service offerings.
While HANA is at the epicenter of SAP’s data management strategy, Vora marks SAP’s commitment to providing
enterprise-grade processing to data lakes. SAP has dominated the enterprise market for over four decades, and
will leverage that know-how to solve companies’ big-data challenges. SAP Vora can be positioned stand-alone
within accounts (i.e., with no SAP footprint) or in conjunction with HANA, where the enterprise and data lake
worlds can be combined.
SAP Vora was purposely designed to deliver enterprise-grade features to data lakes/big-data environments. It
delivers special-purpose engines (graph, time-series, etc.) in one offering, and provides one logical view across
different types of data. SAP Vora runs on Hadoop, and extends Apache Spark. It integrates to HANA, allowing bidi-
rectional consumption of data without the need to move data between tiers.
Linda O’Connor, the Global GTM Lead for Big Data Technologies at SAP, explained to us the need to deliver ac-
celerated and repeatable implementation services to remove the complexity from big-data initiatives. In meeting
Avalon’s Jerry Platz at a SAP Hosted partner workshop, O’Connor learned of the company’s breadth of expertise in
the big-data consulting space. She was particularly interested in the Quick Starter packages (Customer 360˚, IoT
etc.) that Avalon offered, and subsequently introduced Avalon to SAP’s Global Head of Big Data Consulting, Rolf
Zeidler, in addition to the North American sales team.
4. Avalon Consulting LLC is now part of SAP’s PartnerEdge program. Avalon is working with several groups at SAP
– GTM, sales, partner ecosystem and product marketing. It is collaborating with SAP to deliver test drives to al-
low customers to have a functional experience of SAP’s software in addition to software testing prior to it being
released to the market.
CUSTO MERS
Shaw Industries Group is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway headquartered in Dalton, Georgia. It’s the world’s
largest carpet manufacturer, with more than $4bn in annual revenue, and is a customer of Avalon’s. 451 Research
spoke with Shaw’s Jon Rollins, who works in the IT Planning Department and is responsible for information man-
agement.
Shaw had heard the hype around Hadoop, so Rollins looked into the technology from an infrastructure perspec-
tive, and to find use cases for deployment. Initially, he ran a small pilot using Hadoop with security log data in-
ternally within the IT department, and not getting the business involved. The pilot got good results, so the team
started reaching out for partners.
Shaw is a Teradata shop, and is interested in replicating its data warehouse into the Hadoop ecosystem for aug-
mentation. This is because the IT department gets many requests from different parts of the business, and the
traditional data-warehouse process is cumbersome. Rollins wanted help to speed up getting data into Hadoop to
give Shaw more agility, and to drive some adoption via traditional SQL access.
Shaw does not have Hadoop expertise in-house, so Rollins was looking for trusted partners. Using 451 Research
publications, he discovered Avalon, and had a good meeting with the consultancy. He was particularly impressed
with Avalon’s partnering capabilities around knowledge transfer. Shaw and Avalon began by enabling Kerberos
on Shaw’s Hadoop cluster.
In 2017, Rollins expects to identify the killer business case for the technology, working with Shaw’s CIO and Avalon,
and thinks using Hadoop in the digital-marketing area could be a big win for the company. He was not concerned
about Avalon’s small size when contracting with the company because the scope of work Shaw was looking at was
contained. Furthermore, Rollins says that his company’s leadership is pushing everyone to become more agile,
and he feels you get more agility with a smaller partner.
CO MPETITION
When it comes to consulting services for Hadoop, smaller regional consultancies are often good value. Besides
Avalon in the US, niche experts also include Altoros Systems, Caserta Concepts, Cloudwick, Search Technologies
and Trace3. Many global consultancies and systems integrators also have Hadoop capabilities. These include Ac-
centure, Capgemini, Cognizant, CSC, Deloitte, EY, Fujitsu, HCL, Infosys and TCS.
451 RESEARCH REPRINT
5. SWOT ANALYSIS
451 RESEARCH REPRINT
STRENGTHS
Avalon has a great reputation for architectur-
al competency and knowledge transfer. The
consultancy appears not to have much diffi-
culty in attracting and retaining high-caliber
talent. Because Avalon is not a software re-
seller, it is viewed as an honest advisor, with
partners and customers alike attesting to the
company’s professionalism.
WEAKNESSES
Avalon is beginning to reach the size where
it needs to create more formal structures
around sales and marketing. It is concen-
trating on developing a stronger direct sales
capability, but it also needs to strengthen
its marketing activities to capitalize on the
business development work it has been un-
dertaking.
OPPORTUNITIES
Avalon has a lot of opportunities for growth
around big data. It could develop reusable
templates for search, placing the patterns
in a knowledge hub to de-risk projects for
clients, as well as helping Avalon scale. SAP
HANA Vora has the potential to create a lot
of work for the consultancy because, in or-
der to work, the offering needs unstructured
data to become structured. The company
could also develop its packaged search sce-
nario capabilities within a broader BI partner
ecosystem.
THREATS
With market maturity, the attractiveness of
larger-scale service providers will become
stronger in delivering global data-driven pro-
duction environments for the Fortune 500,
which may constrain Avalon’s growth, al-
though there will always be opportunities for
smaller specialized consultancies to provide
services.