Gartner’s Rita Sallam names Saffron Technology as a new vendor for advanced data analytics of structured and unstructured data.
This week I have attended the Gartner BI Summit in Los Angeles.
There was a lot of buzz around the new kid on the block, Big Data Analytics. Can there be too much data? Will there be a real market for big data analytics tools or is it just hype?
Finding corporate treasures in making diverse data actionable
Companies have spent billions to build data warehouses, secure and protect their data.
Very few combine their structured data with the invaluable insights from the web on what their customers feel and do to improve customer service and loyalty, or detect and prevent fraud.
Rita Sallam of Gartner called out Saffron as new vendor to do advanced analytics on hybrid data during her presentation, Deriving New Value From Merging the Worlds of Diverse Data. Hybrid data comes from structured sources like enterprise applications and the unstructured web sources (mainly text).
In this category are also IBM Watson, Autonomy, Attivio and a few others.
I was happy to see Saffron on Gartner’s radar screen and remembered that a friend of mine and former president of a major analytics vendor called Saffron “Watson on steroids” recently.
There was vivid debate between the audience, the vendors and analysts as to whether the big incumbents like IBM, SAP, MS and SAS will extend their BI offerings to be able to handle hybrid data or if a new market for advanced analytics of diverse data analytics will emerge.
Naturally, the big BI vendors are convinced that they will extend into this space of hybrid data.
The majority of the audience and the start-ups were convinced that hybrid data analytics would be a new market.
Rita said there would be market driven convergence towards a hybrid approach. Emerging tools link structured and unstructured data so it can be used for advanced data discovery, pattern detection and decision-making.
Through 2015, organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%. Rita Sallam, Gartner April 2012.
As my friends Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from MIT Sloan School say, The Big Data Boom Is the Innovation Story of Our Time.
