Big Data has become the latest rage, and a survey by the IBM Center for Applied Insights shows why. Organizations that make extensive use of data analytics experienced up to 1.6x the revenue growth, 2.0x EBITDA growth, and a 2.5x stock price appreciation compared to their peers. And what they are analyzing is Big Data, a combination of structured data found in conventional relational databases and unstructured data pouring in from widely varied sources.

How big is Big Data? By 2015 the digital universe, as forecast by IDC, will hit 8 zettabytes (ZB). (1ZB = 1021 bytes, one sextillion bytes). Adding to the sheer volume is the remarkable velocity at which data is created. Every minute 600 new blog posts are published and 34,000 Twitter tweets are sent. If some of that data is about your organization, brand, products, customers, competitors, or employees would you want to know?

This isn’t just for large organizations. Midsize and small businesses can benefit from Big Data too. A small pizza shop chain needs to know the consumer buzz about its pizza as much as Domino’s. Vendors are rushing out products to make Big Data analytics even easier. more

Open source delivers proven technology for less. wiredFINANCE covered open source Linux developments about a year ago here. Open source continues to grow as a viable and valuable technology sourcing option and is experiencing ever-increasing acceptance in the mainstream.

Virtualization, similarly, is a powerful technology that enables numerous benefits and generates significant savings. The savings come mainly through IT resource consolidation. When you add open source to the virtualization equation, it creates another avenue to savings.

Open source virtualization, noted Jean Staten Healy, IBM’s worldwide Cross-IBM Linux and Open Virtualization Director, presents opportunities to reduce virtualization costs in the usual ways and more. For example, the inclusion of the open source KVM hypervisor built into enterprise Linux distributions at no additional charge reduces need for additional hypervisors, enabling the organization to avoid buying more proprietary VMware licenses. And that’s just a start. more

March 11, 2012, marked the one-year anniversary of the devastation caused by an earthquake off Japan’s northwest coast, which created a tsunami that destroyed several coastal towns. It also triggered the events that resulted in terrible nuclear disaster when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant got out of control. This disaster led to severe reductions in Japanese power generation and to the world rethinking the future reliance on nuclear power. It was what has often been called a Black Swan event (while known to be possible, considered highly unusual). more

Howard Rubin formulated Rubin’s Law, a corollary of Moore’s Law, which has driven IT economics for two decades or more. Moore’s law states that the number of circuits packed onto a silicon chip doubles every 18-24 months and has been driving the ability of the IT industry to deliver more capability for the same or less money. Moore’s law was good for business; Rubin’s law is not.

Rubin’s law examines the demand for computing power, stating: The geometric growth rate of computing demand—technology intensity in the context of business and our personal lives—will drive computing costs past the point at which Moore’s Law will keep the costs manageable. What this means is that discontinuous/disruptive technology and innovation are critical to the new economics we’re are about to encounter. In short, business needs technology innovation now.

In a recent Wall Street and Technology piece Rubin elaborated on the four forces that he sees shaping IT economics this coming year. wiredFINANCE summarizes the piece below: more

Publicly traded companies issue annual reports that increasingly look like magazines. Almost all organizations publish a brochure with glossy pictures that describe what their organizations do. In either case they are very traditional, and many look the same. What is needed is a new idea – a better way to communicate their branding and positioning message in a similar way that international countries’ government tourist agencies promote their nations to attract tourists.

In the article below I have written my first draft article of a “tour guide” for a poorly performing company that I will name as the Mesdup Corporation. (Get it? Like as messed up.) It may be a company you know. Mesdup is clueless as to what key performance indicators (KPI) to monitor as feedback for how it is performing. Their accountants are in the Dark Ages when it comes to accurately reporting and analyzing product, service-line, channel, and customer costs and profit margins. Their broadly-averaged cost allocations calculate flawed and misleading information. Mesdup has no idea how to transform their mountains of raw, transactional data into meaningful information for interpretation and analysis. And much of this input data is full of errors and located in many disparate data sources. Mesdup’s demand forecasts are totally unreliable and projected as if they are random. But, the good news for Mesdup is they have a good public relations and advertising firm that can make any bad organization look good. It is impressive what cosmetics can accomplish. more