Open Source

First Look – Rapid-I

March 27, 2012

Rapid-I provides open source software for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining. Incorporated in 2006, they are based in Dortmund Germany and have been working on RapidMiner since 2001. They have over 35,000 production deployments and more than 400 customers in 40 countries. Banking and financial services is their largest market followed by Pharma [...]

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First Look – KNIME Analytics Workbench update

January 23, 2012

KNIME is an open source data analytics product based in Zurich, Switzerland that I last wrote about a couple of years ago. They have been working away on the product since then (having started development in 2004 and released their enterprise components in 2010) and have been refining their business plan at the same time. [...]

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First Look – Talend

January 5, 2012

Talend has been around for about 6 years and the original focus was on “democratizing” data integration – making it cheaper, easier, quicker and less maintenance-heavy. They originally wanted to build an open source alternative for data integration. In particular they wanted to make sure that there was a product that worked for smaller companies [...]

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Transformation in the era of big data and analytics #iod11

October 25, 2011

Steve Mills opened up the discussion talking about Big Data, making the point that the art of the possible when it comes to data has been growing steadily for many years – though the current explosion in data is pretty impressive. For instance 1.3B RFID tags in 2005 and 30B in 2010, 4.6B mobile phones [...]

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First Look JBoss Enterprise SOA and BRMS 5.2

October 12, 2011

I got an overview of JBoss’s new intelligent, integrated enterprise approach as well some of their new product announcements. They are adding new data services, BPEL support, productizing their event/rules combination and adding some new connectivity elements.
The world has obviously changed in the last few years. The fully automated processes of the past, JBoss feels, [...]

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CRISP-DM data mining methodology in hypertext form

September 24, 2011

CRISP-DM – Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining – is the best known data mining methodology out there. It’s been around a long time but ownership/management of the consortium that developed it has gotten complex recently (the CRISP-DM.ORG site is down at present for instance but you can get some details in the CRISP-DM Wikipedia [...]

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Update – Zementis

June 9, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Zementis. I last got an update from them on the product back in May 2010 when they released 3.0 with their support of Drools as well as PMML. Zementis is reporting good momentum with large customers such as the US Army and Verizon as well as a [...]

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IBM’s Big Data Platform and Decision Management

May 24, 2011

IBM has recently announced a new strategy for bringing Big Data to the enterprise. In particular this includes InfoSphere Streams v2 (announced April 12) and InfoSphere BigInsights 1.1 announced today. Big Data is an issue, of course, largely because the amount of data available to organizations is growing rapidly. Surveys show that many managers already [...]

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First Look – OpenRules Rule Solver and Rule Learner

May 12, 2011

I recently published a First Look on the open source OpenRules Decision Management System. Along with traditional Business Rules components, OpenRules includes two other important decision management components:

Rules Solver for solving optimization problems
Rule Learner for predictive analytics.

OpenRules Rule Solver is based on Constraint Programming (CP) [...]

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First Look – Information Builders

April 25, 2011

I recently got a briefing from Information Builders, an independent business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information integration/management (EIM) vendor founded in 1975. They sell their BI and EIM solutions separately, though they are increasingly selling these solutions together. They have 1,350 employees and 12,000 customer sites as well as a strong OEM portfolio. They find [...]

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First Look – OpenRules Decision Management System

April 22, 2011

As promised when I was blogging from the Object Management Group standards meeting, I caught up with OpenRules recently. OpenRules was founded in 2003 by people who had previously developed a business rules management system. Their immediate focus was on business analysts and on empowering subject matter experts to build business rules with minimal IT [...]

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First Look – Drools Planner

April 13, 2011

Drools Planner is a sub project of the Drools project that started 4 years ago as Drools Solver. Drools Planner is focused on “NP complete” planning problems where a solution is hard to find, but easy to prove feasible once found. Examples include scheduling, bin packing and timetabling for instance. Drools Planner is particularly good [...]

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OpenRules and Decision Modeling

March 23, 2011

Jacob Feldman presented to the Object Management Group Decision Modeling Notation meeting on OpenRules – an open source “decision management system”. Jacob argues that OpenRules is a Decision Management System for a number of reasons – besides having a rule engine and a rule engine it also supports automated rule discovery, predictive analytics, an optimization [...]

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First Look – Gurobi Optimization

March 2, 2011

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]

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Future trends in business rules (with a little help from my friends)

January 20, 2011

I was presenting this week to a company that asked what trends I saw in business rules. I had my ow thoughts but I also reached out to some other experience business rules implementers. Here’s what we came up with:

A broader context for business rules

Business rules are increasingly adopted as part of a broader effort [...]

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First Look – Calpont InfiniDB

November 18, 2010

I got my first chance to catch up with Calpont recently. Calpont is a privately held company based in Frisco TX with 25 employees. They have been developing their analytics database technology over the past 2.5 years. InfiniDB Enterprise is the commercial product released in February 2010 and InfiniDB GPL version was launched in October [...]

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Last three webinars in 2010 – Insurance, Analytics, Drools

November 2, 2010

We are wrapping up our webinar series on decision management and I wanted to make sure you knew about the three remaining webinars. These webinars are a great tool for you to learn more about predictive analytics, business rules and decision management in practice. There are more details on the events page [...]

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Webinar: Best practices for using JBoss Drools

October 5, 2010

Claye Greene and Kristy Sanders of Technology Blue are giving a webinar on Best practices for using JBoss Drools on November 16th, 2010 at 10am Pacific.
Open source has proven to be a valuable solution for companies looking to lower implementation costs of software solutions. A few years ago open source Decision Management solutions were considered [...]

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First Look – Cloudera

September 21, 2010

I got my first chance to catch up with the folks at Cloudera recently. Founded in 2008 Cloudera has nothing really to do with “cloud” and focuses instead on “big data” – helping organizations capture, integrate and analyze new sources of detailed business data. Cloudera like to describe themselves as the RedHat for Hadoop – [...]

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First Look – Alfresco Activiti

August 31, 2010

I got an update from the folks at Alfresco recently. This company is an open source content management project, begun by a team that left Documentum some years ago. The project now has about 2M downloads and is a commercial open source company with 1,200 paying customers – mostly among those typically comfortable with open [...]

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