programming

Last session for me at IBM’s World of Watson is the keynote from IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty. Another very slick video on the different ways IBM’s cognitive, cloud and analytic solutions are being used around the world got us started. And again, IBM emphasized “with Watson” as part of their ongoing positioning of Watson as additive to people, [...]

Back when I was attending the SAS Inside Intelligence analyst day they briefed us under embargo about their new Viya platform. This was announced today from SAS Global Forum. Ultimately all the SAS products will be moving to the SAS Viya platform and the platform is designed to ensure that all SAS products have some common characteristics: All [...]

Next up at the SAS Inside Intelligence event are some technology highlights, each based around a day in the life of a particular role. Much of this is under NDA of course. Ryan Schmiedl kicked off with a quick recap of last year’s technology – 150 significant releases across the SAS focus areas. In analytics for instance Factory [...]

I got a briefing from a company that’s new to the US but that I have been aware of for a while – BusinessOptics. The company was founded in South Africa and started about four years ago. The product itself was first released about two years ago and the initial customers are primarily in South [...]

Steve Gold came up to talk about how IBM Watson. Watson, of course, started with the focus on analyzing unstructured data to present hypotheses and learn from the results. Watson brought together lots of IBM projects and technology and Watson Analytics is similar – a combination of various technologies and projects to solve a new problem. [...]

The third post in my series on standards in Predictive Analytics is on R, a hot topic in analytic circles these days. R is fundamentally an interpreted language for statistical computing and for the graphical display of results associated with these statistics. Highly extensible, it is available as free and open source software. The core environment [...]

I last got an update on RapidMiner back in March 2012. The company was founded in 2007 and has 40 employees worldwide. The free product has reached 10,000 downloads a month and the product has some 35,000 active deployments with over 500 customers worldwide (40 added in the last 6 months). The company recently secured [...]

It’s been a while since I last got an update from IDIOM – several years since this update on IDIOM charging by the rule. To recap, IDIOM was founded back in 2001, has 12-15 FTE staff and is solidly based in New Zealand with largely NZ investors and about 80% of their revenue from Australia [...]

4. It will never work There is sometimes an almost irrational fear that this stuff does not work. Old school programmers who resist any technology that does not require JCL Organizations where it’s “just not how we do things here” “We are using methodology X and business rules does not fit” “We do agile programming [...]

I thought I would re-run a top 10 list from a while ago – an oldie but a goodie – on the top 10 excuses for not adopting business rules and a Business Rules Management System. #10 – We tried before and got no results There are two root causes for this excuse – over-hyping [...]

SAS is making a big push around cloud. They want to provide a cloud enabled platform, manage their existing SAS Applications in the cloud, build new applications in the cloud and create a cloud app store for their customers. They want to ensure that all the business analytics solutions based on SAS – whether SAS [...]

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 [...]

I got an update from Microsoft recently. We covered lots of different products in and around data/analytics – some public, some under NDA. Microsoft is making a serious investment in SQL Server as well as into SharePoint and Excel. BI tools, they say, are not getting to most people and Microsoft sees this as an [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ I got another comment on an old article of mine that is linked to a popular programming site – Don’t soft-code, use business rules. This remains my most commented post and the new comment basically repeats some of the arguments made before – that making a change to code is only hard/time [...]

I got my first formal briefing from REvolution Computing recently. REvolution has been around for about 2 years. Originally they focused on bringing parallel computing power to R and providing some consulting around the language. They raised some new funding recently and now have a new management team, including CEO Norman Nie (co-founder of SPSS) [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Paul Brasch wrote a nice piece on Is the Speed of Decision Making Accelerating. He concludes, and I agree, that it is in fact doing so – the need to decide while customers are on the phone or on the website and the need for real-time systems to communicate and act instantaneously [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Jeff Attwood had a great post over on Coding Horror – All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions in which he discussed a Joel Spolsky article in which that states All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. At some level, of course, this is true and Jeff goes on to say But I’d [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Noam Tamarkin had a post recently on Efficient or Effective in software development in which he asked an important question – would you rather be more efficient or more effective when it came to developing software. Most would, like Noam, answer that they preferred to be effective. Yet I see many programming [...]

I got a comment recently from “Joe” who was too much of a coward to actually post his name, his email or to link to his own blog/site/twitter feed. You can read it on my post Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead. His comment was so indicative of the [...]