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The future of loyalty marketing

On August 16, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, By , With No Comments

The future of loyalty marketing combines Big Data being delivered to Big User populations with Mobile access. How do these elements come together into a single, extremely focused solution? Not with traditional loyalty programs or card schemes. It’s not about blindly blasting offers to customers in the hopes of a…

Hadoop redux

On July 22, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

I recently wondered aloud about [Hadoop and its place in the modern enterprise](https://www.sandtechnology.com/hadoop-elephant-room/). I received a lot of feedback on that post, and it brought a few other questions to mind. Hadoop is an Apache project based on some papers Google released on their Map Reduce and Google File System…

Getting Big Information from Big Data

On July 14, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

Big Data has exploded, and it can either bury you and your business, or provide greater amounts of insight into customers and potential customers than ever before. In 2007 the total of Global Data was estimated to be 297 exabytes, equivalent to 1.2 billion average hard drives, or the entire…

Best of breed

On July 8, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

I am an advocate of making hardware and software implementations as simple as possible for everyone involved. When it comes to “version 1” of Data Warehouse Appliances, however, I become Pooh Bear. Pooh, you see, has a small brain and when a new thought enters it, he has to push…

Hadoop: The elephant in the room

On June 27, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

A wise mentor of mine used to comment on start-ups by saying “it is our job as executives to work out if there’s a pony in the room or just a room full of pony poop.” He would describe how, upon opening the door to a room full of poop,…

Fake 4G networks and crippled column databases

On May 18, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

There’s a recent trend among North American mobile carriers to re-brand their 3G cellular networks as “4G”. Originally meant to classify networks approaching 100 Mbps, Sprint began using “4G” for their WiMax network and now – comically – AT&T for their barely 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ phones. Why? It’s easier to…

Angry Databases

On April 19, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

Data warehouses consume data at an alarming rate, getting larger, fatter, greedier, and slower with each passing day. They hide themselves behind impenetrable walls of batch loads, data cleansing, index building, and data augmentation. And there they sit, chortling like an appliance salesperson, content that, no matter how many nodes…

SAND announces multi-dimensional reality alteration in-database analytics

On April 1, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

April 1st, 2011 — SAND today announced the general availability of SAND multi-dimensional reality alteration in-database analytics. Legacy technologies have tried to alter reality for years but SAND has taken this concept to a new level. Using the works of Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University SAND’s multi-dimensional reality alteration analytic…

Old cars and data warehouses

On March 24, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, By , With No Comments

I read a post the other day involving two people arguing about which one of their boxes was better. Teradata this. Exadata that. They spent all their time “working” on their system so they had a lot of ammunition for their argument. I suppose if you want to spend your…

If Larry ran Apple and Oracle made iPads…?

On March 22, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

Apple looks like they have another hit on their hands with iPad 2 and if reports of their enterprise adoption rates are accurate, we’ll only be seeing more of them in business. Now, perhaps, we see why Steve Jobs called it the most important product he’d ever worked on. But…