Historically, the complexities of analytics tools have given rise to a Power User / Casual User split. Power Users consider themselves analytics gurus and commonly author content for others as well as themselves. They have made a niche by being highly skilled at creating beautiful visualizations in dashboards and presenting data visually.

Authority recently talked with Lynne Boudreau, director of partner advocacy at Progress. We covered Lynne’s jump into technology, the company’s data collection and analytics solutions, and what makes the Tech Data and Progress partnership successful. Read on.

Each generation has its own ‘new frontier’ upon which it is defined; today’s is Digital Transformation. Digital Transformation is the DNA of next-gen technology and the genetic roadmap for tomorrow’s evolutionary tech genome, the Fourth Platform. At the cellular level of all of this is big data. The ability to analyze data on a global scale to instantly reveal behavioral patterns, correlations, market trends and customer preferences, will be a game changer; an order of magnitude shift in business intelligence.

A World of ‘Things’

When I was a kid, a specific reference to “things” had but one meaning – the twin brothers, Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Suess’ Cat in the Hat. Today, ‘things’ can be any number of things. The ambiguity of its meaning adopts an even more esoteric understanding when used in conjunction with the vastness of the internet.

The popularity of “as a service” offerings continues to grow, and it seems like you can pretty much find anything as a service—there’s almost an “aaS” for every letter of the alphabet. One you may know in theory but not necessarily by name is “BDaaS,” or Big Data as a Service also considered to be data analytics managed services. 

Last year, I gave a presentation to industry executives where I discussed my five big data predictions for 2016. I don’t make a lot of predictions personally, but I enjoy understanding the merits of why others would do so. I thought it would be interesting to revisit these thought-provoking predictions and posit some thoughts of my own for 2017.

There’s a real fear when it comes to deleting data. No matter how obscure or obsolete information may seem, many healthcare organizations view data deletion as a risk they could be deleting research that holds the key to the next major medical breakthrough.

I have spent many years working with business partners, and as I consider the many partners I have worked with, there is a type of business that always seems to do very well. It’s the companies that identify themselves according to their specific capability strength (e.g. analytics, collaboration, security), as opposed to vendor expertise (e.g. IBM, Oracle, HP).  Instead of saying “we are true blue,” meaning that all they do is IBM, they say, “we are an IT consulting firm specializing in analytics”, or “we are Enterprise Security experts”.

As the hype around big data is starting to fade, the hard work of implementation begins for many organizations. I’d like to share some of the most valuable lessons we, at Avnet, have learned so far on our journey to big data success.

You’ve heard it before – data is the lifeblood of every organization. Every business has it, and when data mining and analytics are applied to expose the valuable business information embedded in data, an organization of any size can improve performance and decision quality, while uncovering the knowledge in order to advance and compete. Growing at an unstoppable rate, the possibilities ahead with big data and analytics are endless.