Category Archives: Data Integration

Stop Hoarding Data – Retire Your Old, Redundant Applications!

Claudia Chandra

Just like your house needs yearly spring cleaning and you need to regularly throw out old junk, your application portfolio needs periodic review and rationalization to identify legacy, redundant applications that can be decommissioned to reduce bloat and save costs. If you have a hard time letting go of old stuff, it’s probably even harder for your application users to let go of access to their data. However, retiring applications doesn’t have to mean that you also lose the data within them. If the data within those applications are still needed for periodic reporting or for regulatory compliance, then there are still ways to retain the data without maintaining the application.  Read More »

Social, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and … Agile BI

Rob Meyer

I just came back from MicroStrategy World. There were many conversations about social, mobile, cloud and big data. There was strong interest in cloud, clear adoption of mobile, and some big data adoption. eHarmony had a great presentation about how they handle big data with Informatica, and how they’re starting to use Hadoop with Informatica HParser running on Hadoop for processing JSON.

But that wasn’t the number one conversation.  The one topic that everyone was interested in – and I talked to nearly 100 customers and partners over four days – was creating new reports faster, or Agile BIRead More »

Social Media Monitoring with CEP, pt. 2: Context As Important As Sentiment

Chris Carlson

When I last wrote about social media monitoring, I made a case for using a technology like Complex Event Processing (“CEP”) to detect rapidly growing and geospatially-oriented social media mentions that can provide early warning detection for the public good (Social Media Monitoring for Early Warning of Public Safety Issues, Oct. 27, 2011).

A recent article by Chris Matyszczyk of CNET highlights the often conflicting and confusing nature of monitoring social media.  A 26-year old British citizen, Leigh Van Bryan, gearing up for a holiday of partying in Los Angeles, California (USA), tweeted in British slang his intention to have a good time:  “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.” Since I’m not too far removed the culture of youth, I did take this to mean partying, cutting loose, having a good time (and other not-so-current definitions.) Read More »

Lean Architecture

John Schmidt

Lean management practices have been applied in recent years to virtually all business functions and processes, including of course Lean Integration.  IT architecture is no exception. But what exactly does a Lean Architecture look like and how could you measure its “leanness”?  Since there is no generally accepted definition lean architecture, and since I won’t bore you with mine, it might be easier to describe what a non-lean architecture looks like. Or to ask it differently, what are some non-lean approaches to architecture? Read More »

Integrating Social Media with Enterprise Data

Kin Cheung

While watching a television re-run of House MD a few weeks ago, there was an American Express commercial featuring Tweets from customers who have made purchases with their reward program points.  American Express has taken ‘listening’ to social media data to the next level and is using it to its own advantage.  By giving their customers a forum to Tweet their experiences through socialcurrency.com, they are taking the social media era by storm. Read More »