The primary purpose of pursuing an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy is to gain greater insight into how your products and services are being utilized. In capturing IoT data, this allows you to better serve your customers, discover new business opportunities and gain a greater competitive advantage.

IoT is all about capturing data from a broader set of endpoints and making that data available to a wider set of internal and external stakeholders. Due to the sensitivity of this data, it must be moved in a secure and reliable fashion. However, the volume and velocity of the data requires that the data traffic be monitored.

Click here to read why THINKstrategies believes CIOs and their IT organizations should carefully evaluate their current file transfer policies and tools to be sure they’re properly designed and configured to meet the more complicated requirements of the … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today Qubole has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Qubole  is a self-service big data analytics company that provides a fast, easy and reliable path to turn big data into valuable business insights. Qubole’s cloud-based platform simplifies the challenges of managing infrastructure to process huge volumes of structured and unstructured data. With Qubole deployed in an Amazon Web Services, Google Compute and/or Microsoft Azure Cloud, enterprises put big data processing in the hands of their users without having to build … Read More »

Rising competition and fading customer loyalty are compelling a growing number of companies to launch new digital initiatives, adopt the latest “omnichannel” marketing capabilities and become more “customer centric.” Making this move requires new technologies and new thinking, a combination that poses significant organizational problems for most businesses.

A great deal of today’s digital challenge is driven by the advent of mobile technologies and social applications, which enable customers to access information regarding competing products and services in new ways. In response, companies must develop new tactics to engage customers via multiple “channels.” This means companies must adjust the way they convey information about their products and services to fit a variety of mobile devices and use various methods to prompt customers to try or buy their offerings.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in Sandhill.com regarding the challenges and opportunities facing enterprises undertaking … Read More »

I’ve long believed that we wouldn’t be talking about “Big Data” if it wasn’t for the ability of today’s cloud-based services to enable us to capture, store, analyze, and share the insights from the data more cost-effectively today than ever before. Yet, most organizations are still facing serious challenges trying to unlock the escalating volumes and variety of data being generated by social media, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other technological developments despite the rapid advancements in data analytics and business intelligence (BI).

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in All Analytics regarding how a new generation of Cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BI and data analytics alternatives are overcoming these escalating challenges.

Now that cloud computing has made it economically feasible to capture and collate large volumes of data — that is, “big data” — many organizations are trying to find an equally economical method to analyze and move the data across various business applications.

The rapidly escalating demands for powerful analytic tools to decipher the meaning of old and new data streams are driving many organizations to invest millions of dollars in data scientists and expensive consulting services.

Click here to read my latest blogpost in E-Commerce Times which describes how two cloud-based companies, Algorithmia and Bedrock Data, are offering online marketplaces to remedy these age-old issues.

Everyone is talking about the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), but few organizations are getting very far in capitalizing on the exciting new market opportunities created by IoT because they lack a designated executive leader responsible for spearheading their IoT initiatives. Capitalizing on current and future IoT opportunities depends on pulling together numerous technological components and assembling them to achieve a number of corporate objectives. This is a significant undertaking. It can require a technological supply-chain extending from remotely deployed sensors; numerous mobile, desktop and enterprise software applications; a variety of databases; and multiple cloud services.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in Datamation about why enterprises should establish a new Chief IoT Officer position to lead their efforts in this rapidly growing marketplace.

As the volume and variety of data continues to escalate, the promise of a powerful new generation of data analytics tools converting this data into valuable information and insight continues to be just as elusive.

In particular, there is a growing debate regarding the potential of Hadoop to serve as a key component in corporate initiatives to unlock the value of Big Data due to the limited success of the first round of real-world deployments over the past year.

A December 16, 2014 Wall Street Journal article entitled, “The Joys and Hype of Software Called Hadoop: Big Data Is Hot in Silicon Valley, and Hadoop Underpins Craze,” described the dichotomy between the grandiose expectations among industry analysts and the investment community compared with the bitter realities of CIOs and other technology practitioners struggling to put Hadoop to work.

THINKstrategies believes there are some … Read More »

THINKstrategies believes the only way organizations will be able to reap a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) from their Internet of Things (IoT) deployments and gain the additional insights from Big Data will be by leveraging more Cloud services. So any IT or business decision-maker who continues to resist the idea of employing cloud services to offset the costs and complexities of in-house data centers will stand in the way of fully capitalizing on today’s IoT opportunities. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives re: the business implications of these trends in E-Commerce Times.

We’re all painfully aware of the overwhelming growth of Big Data. Yet, only 13 percent of organizations surveyed by Gartner have deployed solutions to overcome their Big Data challenges, despite 73 percent of respondents reporting they have invested or plan to invest in Big Data in the next 24 months, up from 64 percent in 2013. Salesforce.com recently announced its remedy for the Big Data challenge – the Analytics Cloud. The much anticipated offering was revealed at Dreamforce 2014, after it had been leaked by the company’s co-founder and CEO, Marc Benioff in a promotional tweet. Click here to read our views in Datamation about the important value propositions that underlie Salesforce.com’s Analytics Cloud offering.

Just as organizations begin to catch their breath and get a grip on current big data challenges, a new wave is coming at us. I’m talking about the rapidly evolving ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) marketplace and its attendant new business opportunities. As always, the burden will fall on IT to solve the data storage, integration, and analytics dilemmas created by the IoT. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in InformationWeek about how IT should address today’s rapidly evolving IoT big data opportunities and challenges.