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7 Best Ways Big Data Is Transforming The Real Estate Business

7 Best Ways Big Data Is Transforming The Real Estate Business
Real estate firms can enhance their decision-making with the help of Big Data Analytics. The real estate industry was using the data of past events which were not that effective. But now Real estate businesses can use Big Data Analytics for accurate real-time data. The real estate business holds very big risks, not for only developers, it affects the businessmen and investors too.

Big Data Analytics help them to get out of this situation and help them to identify their prime opportunities in real estate. With the help of Big Data Analytics real estate professionals will be able to use geographic as well as structured data and that too for targeted marketing.

Big Data Analytics analysis the insights of the needs of investment trends and customer desires and the personalized interactions too. So what are those fields in which Big Data Analytics can contribute to the real estate firms?
  • Accuracy in property appraisals
  • Price predictions
  • Risk managing
  • Healthy selling and buying habits


Now Bow Big Data Analytics Is Going To Transform The Real Estate Business?


1) Management of Risk
With the help of Big Data Analytics Real estate businesses can precisely predict the age of the property and also they can redesign and renovate their property according to their needs. Well, with the help of this the potential risk factors for the buyers and the investors will be reduced.

The buyer can make fair cash offers regardless of the condition of the property and also BIg data analytics will take care that their customers never be at a loss. 

2) Prospective And Interested Buyers
Let me tell you one use of big data analytics. With the help of this technology, the agents no longer need to project blindly they can actually predict the behavior of their customers.

The needs of potential buyers can also be analyzed by Big Data and as agents find their customers the customers will be able to find relevant agents to buy their expected real estate property.

3) Higher Property Valuation
Property valuation is one of the most important things in the Real Estate market. It decides to make or break the real estate firm. Big Data analytics give insights to the customers about the market conditions, buyer profiles, and other data precisely.

Data analytics work on prediction bases and they provide the demographic changes with the help of these changes the estate marketing will be able to forecast the behavior of the customer.

Based on the location with the help of Big Data Analytics real estate managers can design and develop their projects likewise.  Also, there are apps that use big data analytics.

Also Read | Banks in the Metaverse: Why to Get In Early and 3 Ways to Start

4) Improvement In Marketing Strategies
The private and public data sources, business surveys, and social media gives them insights that enhance your ability to determine the right market for your project. For instance, take an example, Big Data analytics can give you the data by sorting gender, age, preference, interests, and region. Which will eventually enhance the market interaction of specific firms.

5) Customer’s Experience On Top
Big Data insights collected from several platforms like CRM Systems, and social media can help customers to enhance their experience. The agents in the real estate industry can really use and utilize the data to target their potential customers.

Well, the customers should rely on agents in the terms of Big Data analytics because Agents understand the needs of customers, and make suggestions on properties depending on buyer preferences.

6) Perfect Predictions
With the help of Big Data analytics, the buyers and the sellers can avoid the risks which come in way of the project. Gone are those days when we guessed the real estate trends. Now we can actually analyze them in a proper manner and work on it like it’s left-hand’s play. Also with the great reduction in time.

Perfect Predictions of Big Data can be done with the help of computer algorithms. Big data Analytics help buyers and sellers forecast the market fluctuations and that too real-time.

There are two different perspectives. Let me discuss them in detail.
  • Low risks properties can be appreciated well with the help of great predictions.
  • Meanwhile, agents and investors think that high risks can give great results.

7) Personalization Of Property Data
Big data companies focus on the things that go unnoticed. For example, the amount of sunlight that comes into a room. If you follow your steps to the real estate possession, it will be time-consuming, but with the Big Data analytics, it will be easier for you to get real-time and accurate information about the property.

Conclusion
Big data analytics is now in use in several industries. Meanwhile, the Real estate industry is also trying to step up and get the help of big data analytics. Well, you can not say that they are not using this technology, They are using it for their greater good. Big Data analytics have become a decision-making factor for all sectors. If you want to transform your business, real estate business particularly, this article will help you from the start to the end.

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Big Data Management, Data Science, Big Data

How I Built a Bot for Udemy That Acts as a Secondary Filter for My Courses

Article | May 16, 2023

Udemy is a great place to learn whatever you want. You can enroll in a few free courses as well as a few paid ones. There are tons of sites that offer the paid ones for free. How these sites work is that the instructors give the students a limited time frame and a coupon that enables them to get the course for free. So I built a small bot which would enroll in those free courses (as I was bored and just wrote some random code). That turned out to be a mistake, as after a few days, there were a few hundred courses in my account. Now I thought, “ok, I could just filter those enrolled courses by rating and maybe check out a few top-rated courses.” But then I saw that Udemy offers only a filter by “title,” “instructor name” and so on. But not filtered by rating. A random snippet of the source code of the bot. Then I thought about it why not create a bot which filters the ratings and fetches me its links? Since I made a bot to collect courses, why not build one for filtering as well? Ideally this is what I did (cuz I was “jobless” and I wish I could’ve coded something useful then. Anyway, here it is. • Link to the Code. • Link to the Demo Video Challenges Faced while building this and how I solved them. • Implicit wait() and explicit wait() make the driver wait for a specified number of seconds for some element to load, but do not delay the driver for that many seconds. The selenium driver would give a "NoSuchElementException" . This was solved by using time.sleep() • 2 functions calling self.driver in the same class created 2 different driver instances, rather than linking them. (As suggested by a few posts on stack overflow). This was solved by creating a base class which initializes the driver and inherits from that class.

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Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Transforming the Gaming Industry with AI Analytics

Article | May 15, 2023

In 2020, the gaming market generated over 177 billion dollars, marking an astounding 23% growth from 2019. While it may be incredible how much revenue the industry develops, what’s more impressive is the massive amount of data generated by today’s games. There are more than 2 billion gamers globally, generating over 50 terabytes of data each day. The largest game companies in the world can host 2.5 billion unique gaming sessions in a single month and host 50 billion minutes of gameplay in the same period. The gaming industry and big data are intrinsically linked. Companies that develop capabilities in using that data to understand their customers will have a sizable advantage in the future. But doing this comes with its own unique challenges. Games have many permutations, with different game types, devices, user segments, and monetization models. Traditional analytics approaches, which rely on manual processes and interventions by operators viewing dashboards, are insufficient in the face of the sheer volume of complex data generated by games. Unchecked issues lead to costly incidents or missed opportunities that can significantly impact the user experience or the company’s bottom line. That’s why many leading gaming companies are turning to AI and Machine Learning to address these challenges. Gaming Analytics AI Gaming companies have all the data they need to understand who their users are, how they engage with the product, and whether they are likely to churn. The challenge is gaining valuable business insights into the data and taking action before opportunities pass and users leave the game. AI/ML helps bridge this gap by providing real-time, actionable insights on near limitless data streams so companies can design around these analytics and act more quickly to resolve issues. There are two fundamental categories that companies should hone in on to make the best use of their gaming data: The revenue generating opportunities in the gaming industry is one reason it’s a highly competitive market. Keeping gamers engaged requires emphasizing the user experience and continuous delivery of high-quality content personalized to a company’s most valued customers. Customer Engagement and User Experience Graphics and creative storylines are still vital, and performance issues, in particular, can be a killer for user enjoyment and drive churn. But with a market this competitive, it might not be enough to focus strictly on these issues. Games can get an edge on the competition by investing in gaming AI analytics to understand user behaviors, likes, dislikes, seasonality impacts and even hone in on what makes them churn or come back to the game after a break. AI-powered business monitoring solutions deliver value to the customer experience and create actionable insights to drive future business decisions and game designs to acquire new customers and prevent churn. AI-Enhanced Monetization and Targeted Advertising All games need a way to monetize. It’s especially true in today’s market, where users expect games to always be on and regularly deliver new content and features. A complex combination of factors influences how monetization practices and models enhance or detract from a user’s experience with a game. When monetization frustrates users, it’s typically because of aggressive, irrelevant advertising campaigns or models that aren’t well suited to the game itself or its core players. Observe the most successful products in the market, and one thing you will consistently see is highly targeted interactions. Developers can use metrics gleaned from AI analytics combined with performance marketing to appeal to their existing users and acquire new customers. With AI/ML, games can use personalized ads that cater to users’ or user segments’ behavior in real-time, optimizing the gaming experience and improving monetization outcomes. Using AI based solutions, gaming studios can also quickly identify growth opportunities and trends with real-time insight into high performing monetization models and promotions. Mobile Gaming Company Reduces Revenue Losses from Technical Incident One mobile gaming company suffered a massive loss when a bug in a software update disrupted a marketing promotion in progress. The promotion involved automatically pushing special offers and opportunities for in-app purchases across various gaming and marketing channels. When a bug in an update disrupted the promotions process, the analytics team couldn’t take immediate action because they were unaware of the issue. Their monitoring process was ad hoc, relying on the manual review of multiple dashboards, and unfortunately, by the time they discovered the problem, it was too late. The result was a massive loss for the company – a loss of users, a loss of installations, and in the end, more than 15% revenue loss from in-app purchases. The company needed a more efficient and timely way to track its cross-promotional metrics, installations, and revenue. A machine learning-based approach, like Anodot’s AI-powered gaming analytics, provides notifications in real-time to quickly find and react to any breakdowns in the system and would have prevented the worst of the impacts. Anodot’s AI-Powered Analytics for Gaming The difference between success and failure is how companies respond to the ocean of data generated by their games and their users. Anodot’s AI-powered Gaming Analytics solutions can learn expected behavior in the complex gaming universe across all permutations of gaming, including devices, levels, user segments, pricing, and ads. Anodot’s Gaming AI platform is specifically designed to monitor millions of gaming metrics and help ensure a seamless gaming experience. Anodot monitors every critical metric and establishes a baseline of standard behavior patterns to quickly alert teams to anomalies that might represent issues or opportunities. Analytics teams see how new features impact user behavior, with clear, contextual alerts for spikes, drops, purchases, and app store reviews without the need to comb over dashboards trying to find helpful information. The online gaming space represents one of the more recent areas where rapid data collection and analysis can provide a competitive differentiation. Studios using AI powered analytics will keep themselves and their players ahead of the game.

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Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Navigating Big Data Integration: Challenges and Strategies

Article | July 18, 2023

Explore the complexities of integrating Big Data into your organization. Learn effective strategies for overcoming challenges to optimize your data integration process and maximize business outcomes. Contents 1 Introduction 2 Challenges in Big Data Integration 2.1 Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety Challenges 2.2 Integration with Legacy Systems and Data Silos 2.3 Technical Challenges 2.4 Organizational Challenges 3 Overcoming Integration Challenges: Strategies 3.1 Conducting Thorough Analysis of Data Infrastructure 3.2 Prioritizing Projects Based On Business Needs 3.3 Implementing Scalable and Flexible Solutions 3.4 Establishing Robust Data Governance Practices 4 Conclusion 1. Introduction Big data integration is a critical component of effective data management for organizations of all sizes. While some CIOs may believe that consolidating legacy data sources into a single platform can solve integration challenges, the reality is often more complex. Data is vast and usually spread across multiple sources, making integration a daunting task. Nearly 25% of businesses struggle with integrating new applications with their old systems. That’s because legacy system integration isn’t always easy to achieve. (Source: Gartner) Thus, to tackle big data integration effectively, it's essential to understand how it fits into the organization's overall data management strategy and determine the policies governing the integration process. In addition, there are several technical challenges involved in data integration, including ensuring all components work well together, reflecting trends in big data analytics, and finding skilled big data engineers and analysts. 2. Challenges in Big Data Integration 2.1 Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety Challenges In order to effectively integrate big data, companies must address the three key components of volume, variety, and velocity. Coordinating and managing massive amounts of data is both logistically challenging and costly, especially with large volumes. Working with multiple data sources is also a major hurdle that necessitates advanced analytics resources and expertise. Large datasets can take weeks to process, making real-time data analytics an arduous task. This becomes particularly challenging when dealing with intricate and extensive datasets, where velocity poses a significant obstacle. Attempting to apply a uniform analytical process to all data sets may be impractical, further impeding progress. 2.2 Integration with Legacy Systems and Data Silos According to a report, 25% of organizations have more than 50 unique data silos, and these prevent companies from harnessing their data for their business. (Source: 451 Research) The integration of legacy systems presents a significant challenge for companies, as it entails various difficulties, such as high maintenance costs, data silos, compliance issues, weaker data security, and a lack of integration with new systems. The maintenance of legacy systems is both expensive and futile, leaving a company with outdated technology and a tarnished reputation due to potential breaches. Furthermore, legacy systems may fail to meet evolving compliance regulations such as GDPR and lack appropriate data security measures. Over time, data silos can develop due to organizational structures and company culture, leading to difficulties in achieving effective data integration. Siloed data obstructs departments from accessing the full benefits of new systems, impeding technological growth within a company. Additionally, legacy systems may not be compatible with new systems, causing further communication issues. 2.3 Technical Challenges Selecting the Right Big Data Integration Tools Choosing the right tools, technologies and big data integration services is crucial to meet specific business needs. It can be challenging to keep up with the constantly evolving technology landscape, making it important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations. The decision-making process should involve a thorough evaluation of existing tools and technologies to determine their effectiveness and relevance to the integration process. Failure to choose the appropriate tools and technologies can lead to inefficiencies, longer processing times, and increased costs. Ensuring Different Systems and Data Formats Compatibility It is estimated that around 85% of big data projects will fail to meet all their objectives, illustrating the scale of the challenge that businesses face when trying to get a handle on complex and disparate data from across the enterprise. (Source: Gartner) In integrating big data, it is common to have different systems and data formats that need to be integrated. Ensuring compatibility between these different systems and data formats can be a challenge. A solution-based approach to this challenge is to use data integration platforms that provide support for a wide range of data formats and systems. This ensures that the integration process is seamless and efficient. Addressing Issues of Data Quality and Completeness To integrate big data successfully, it's essential to address issues related to data quality and completeness. Only accurate or complete data can lead to correct insights and precise decision-making, which can benefit businesses. Developing comprehensive data quality management strategies that include data profiling, cleansing, and validation is necessary to overcome this challenge. These strategies ensure that the data being integrated is accurate and complete, leading to better actionable insights and business intelligence. 2.4 Organizational Challenges Developing Comprehensive Integration Strategy Developing a clear and comprehensive integration strategy for big data can be challenging, but it is essential for success. The developed strategy should clearly outline the business objectives and the scope of the integration effort as well as identify the key stakeholders involved. Additionally, it should define the technical requirements and resources necessary to support the integration effort. Building Cross-Functional Teams to Support Integration Efforts Building cross-functional teams for successful data integration can be challenging due to identifying the right individuals with diverse skill sets and navigating complex technical environments. However, it is crucial to form teams comprising members from various departments, including IT, data science, and administration, who collaborate to identify business needs, devise an integration strategy, and implement integration solutions. Building such teams promotes effective communication and coordination across departments and stakeholders, enabling organizations to leverage data assets effectively. 3. Overcoming Integration Challenges: Strategies 3.1 Conducting Thorough Analysis of Data Infrastructure Conducting a thorough analysis of existing data infrastructure and systems is the first step in any data integration effort. This analysis should identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing infrastructure and systems. This information can be used to develop a comprehensive integration strategy that addresses existing challenges and identifies opportunities for improvement. 3.2 Prioritizing Projects Based On Business Needs It is crucial to prioritize, and sequence integration projects based on business needs to leverage the benefits of data integration. This approach ensures that resources are allocated appropriately and the most critical projects are addressed first. Conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis is an effective way to determine the value and impact of each project to prioritize and plan accordingly. 3.3 Implementing Scalable and Flexible Solutions In orderto accommodate the ever-increasing amount of data and evolving business requirements, it is essential to implement scalable and flexible integration solutions. This approach ensures that the integration process remains efficient and can adapt to changing needs. Modern data integration platforms that support cloud-based solutions, real-time data processing, and flexible data models can be adopted to achieve this. 3.4 Establishing Robust Data Governance Practices Establishing robust data governance practices ensures data is managed effectively throughout the integration process. This involves defining clear policies, procedures, and standards for data management across the entire data lifecycle, from acquisition to disposition. Additionally, data quality and security controls should be implemented, and employees must be trained on data governance best practices. Organizations can effectively manage data by establishing these practices throughout the integration process. It includes defining data ownership, establishing policies, and implementing quality controls. Ultimately, this approach ensures that data is accurate, complete, and reliable and that the organization is compliant with any relevant regulations or standards. 4. Conclusion Integrating big data represents a formidable obstacle for many organizations, yet with the proper strategies in place, these challenges can be surmounted, enabling businesses to unleash the full potential of their data assets. It is paramount that organizations possess a comprehensive and lucid understanding of both the technical and organizational challenges inherent in integrating big data. Businesses must prioritize data integration and processing initiatives based on their commercial requirements, employ scalable and flexible solutions, and establish robust data governance practices. By doing so, they can acquire invaluable insights that drive business growth and innovation, improve operational efficiency, and enhance their competitiveness in the market.

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Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Big Data in Healthcare: Improving Patient Outcomes

Article | April 27, 2023

Explore the impact of big data on the healthcare industry and how it is being used to improve patient outcomes. Discover how big data is being leveraged to enhance overall healthcare delivery. Contents 1. Introduction 1.1 Role of Big Data in Healthcare 1.2 The Importance of Patient Outcomes 2. How Big Data Improves Patient Outcomes 2.1 Personalized Medicine and Treatment Plans 2.2 Early Disease Detection and Prevention 2.3 Improved Patient Safety and Reduced Medical Errors 3. Challenges and Considerations While Using Big Data in Healthcare 4. Final thoughts 1. Introduction In today's constantly evolving healthcare industry, the significance of big data cannot be overstated. Its multifaceted nature makes it a valuable asset to healthcare providers in their efforts to enhance patient outcomes and reduce business costs. When harnessed effectively, big data in healthcare provides companies with the insights they need to personalize healthcare, streamline customer service processes, and improve their practices for interacting with patients. This results in a more tailored and thorough experience for customers, ultimately leading to better care. 1.1 Role of Big Data in Healthcare Big data pertains to vast collections of structured and unstructured data in the healthcare industry. One of the primary sources of big data in healthcare is electronic health records (EHRs), which contain: Patient’s medical history Demographics Medications Test results Analyzing this data can: Facilitate informed decision-making Improve patient outcomes Reduce healthcare costs Integrating structured and unstructured data can add significant value to healthcare organizations, and Big Data Analytics (BDA) is the tool used to extract information from big data. Big Data Analytics (BDA) can extract information and create trends, and in healthcare, it can identify clusters, correlations, and predictive models from large datasets. However, privacy and security concerns and ensuring data accuracy and reliability are significant challenges that must be addressed. 1.2 The Importance of Patient Outcomes Patient outcomes are the consequences of healthcare interventions or treatments on a patient's health status and are essential in evaluating healthcare systems and guiding healthcare decision-making. However, the current healthcare system's focus on volume rather than value has led to fragmented payment and delivery systems that fall short in terms of quality, outcomes, costs, and equity. To overcome these shortcomings, a learning healthcare system is necessary to continuously apply knowledge for improved patient outcomes and affordability. However, access to timely guidance is limited, and organizational and technological limitations pose significant challenges in measuring patient-centered outcomes. 2. How Big Data Improves Patient Outcomes Big data in healthcare engenders a substantial impact by facilitating the delivery of treatment that is both efficient and effective. This innovative approach to healthcare enables the identification of high-risk patients, prediction of disease outbreaks, management of hospital performance, and improvement of treatment effectiveness. Thanks to modern technology, the collection of electronic data is now a seamless process, thus empowering healthcare professionals to create data-driven solutions to improve patient outcomes. 2.1 Personalized Medicine and Treatment Plans Big data can revolutionize personalized medicine and treatment plans by analyzing vast patient data to create tailored treatment plans for each patient, resulting in better outcomes, fewer side effects, and faster recovery times. 2.2 Early Disease Detection and Prevention Big data analytics in healthcare allow for early interventions and treatments by identifying patterns and trends that indicate disease onset. This improves patient outcomes and reduces healthcare costs. Real-time patient data monitoring and predictive analytics enable timely action to prevent complications. 2.3 Improved Patient Safety and Reduced Medical Errors Big data analytics can help healthcare providers identify safety risks like medication errors, misdiagnoses, and adverse reactions, improving patient safety and reducing medical errors. This can lead to cost savings and better patient outcomes. 3. Challenges and Considerations While Using Big Data in Healthcare In order to maximize the potential advantages, organizations must address significant challenges of big data in healthcare, like privacy and security concerns, data accuracy and reliability, and expertise and technology requirements. Safeguards like encryption, access controls, and data de-identification can mitigate privacy and security risks Ensuring data accuracy and reliability requires standardized data collection, cleaning, and validation procedures Additionally, healthcare organizations must prioritize the recruitment of qualified professionals with expertise in data management, and analysis is crucial The adoption of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can support effective analysis and interpretation of big data in healthcare 4. Final Thoughts The impact of big data on healthcare is profound, and the healthcare sector possesses the possibility of a paradigm shift by leveraging the potential of big data to augment patient outcomes and curtail costs. Nevertheless, implementing big data entails formidable challenges that necessitate their resolution to fully unleash healthcare data technology's benefits. Notably, handling voluminous and heterogeneous datasets in real time requires state-of-the-art technological solutions. To attain the maximal benefits of big data in healthcare, organizations must proactively address these challenges by implementing risk-mitigating measures and fully capitalizing on big data's potential.

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Big Data Management, Data Science, Big Data

The Future of Big Data: Trends and Innovations for 2023 and Beyond

Article | May 16, 2023

Udemy is a great place to learn whatever you want. You can enroll in a few free courses as well as a few paid ones. There are tons of sites that offer the paid ones for free. How these sites work is that the instructors give the students a limited time frame and a coupon that enables them to get the course for free. So I built a small bot which would enroll in those free courses (as I was bored and just wrote some random code). That turned out to be a mistake, as after a few days, there were a few hundred courses in my account. Now I thought, “ok, I could just filter those enrolled courses by rating and maybe check out a few top-rated courses.” But then I saw that Udemy offers only a filter by “title,” “instructor name” and so on. But not filtered by rating. A random snippet of the source code of the bot. Then I thought about it why not create a bot which filters the ratings and fetches me its links? Since I made a bot to collect courses, why not build one for filtering as well? Ideally this is what I did (cuz I was “jobless” and I wish I could’ve coded something useful then. Anyway, here it is. • Link to the Code. • Link to the Demo Video Challenges Faced while building this and how I solved them. • Implicit wait() and explicit wait() make the driver wait for a specified number of seconds for some element to load, but do not delay the driver for that many seconds. The selenium driver would give a "NoSuchElementException" . This was solved by using time.sleep() • 2 functions calling self.driver in the same class created 2 different driver instances, rather than linking them. (As suggested by a few posts on stack overflow). This was solved by creating a base class which initializes the driver and inherits from that class.

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Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Harnessing the Power of Big Data: Events to attend in 2023

Article | May 15, 2023

In 2020, the gaming market generated over 177 billion dollars, marking an astounding 23% growth from 2019. While it may be incredible how much revenue the industry develops, what’s more impressive is the massive amount of data generated by today’s games. There are more than 2 billion gamers globally, generating over 50 terabytes of data each day. The largest game companies in the world can host 2.5 billion unique gaming sessions in a single month and host 50 billion minutes of gameplay in the same period. The gaming industry and big data are intrinsically linked. Companies that develop capabilities in using that data to understand their customers will have a sizable advantage in the future. But doing this comes with its own unique challenges. Games have many permutations, with different game types, devices, user segments, and monetization models. Traditional analytics approaches, which rely on manual processes and interventions by operators viewing dashboards, are insufficient in the face of the sheer volume of complex data generated by games. Unchecked issues lead to costly incidents or missed opportunities that can significantly impact the user experience or the company’s bottom line. That’s why many leading gaming companies are turning to AI and Machine Learning to address these challenges. Gaming Analytics AI Gaming companies have all the data they need to understand who their users are, how they engage with the product, and whether they are likely to churn. The challenge is gaining valuable business insights into the data and taking action before opportunities pass and users leave the game. AI/ML helps bridge this gap by providing real-time, actionable insights on near limitless data streams so companies can design around these analytics and act more quickly to resolve issues. There are two fundamental categories that companies should hone in on to make the best use of their gaming data: The revenue generating opportunities in the gaming industry is one reason it’s a highly competitive market. Keeping gamers engaged requires emphasizing the user experience and continuous delivery of high-quality content personalized to a company’s most valued customers. Customer Engagement and User Experience Graphics and creative storylines are still vital, and performance issues, in particular, can be a killer for user enjoyment and drive churn. But with a market this competitive, it might not be enough to focus strictly on these issues. Games can get an edge on the competition by investing in gaming AI analytics to understand user behaviors, likes, dislikes, seasonality impacts and even hone in on what makes them churn or come back to the game after a break. AI-powered business monitoring solutions deliver value to the customer experience and create actionable insights to drive future business decisions and game designs to acquire new customers and prevent churn. AI-Enhanced Monetization and Targeted Advertising All games need a way to monetize. It’s especially true in today’s market, where users expect games to always be on and regularly deliver new content and features. A complex combination of factors influences how monetization practices and models enhance or detract from a user’s experience with a game. When monetization frustrates users, it’s typically because of aggressive, irrelevant advertising campaigns or models that aren’t well suited to the game itself or its core players. Observe the most successful products in the market, and one thing you will consistently see is highly targeted interactions. Developers can use metrics gleaned from AI analytics combined with performance marketing to appeal to their existing users and acquire new customers. With AI/ML, games can use personalized ads that cater to users’ or user segments’ behavior in real-time, optimizing the gaming experience and improving monetization outcomes. Using AI based solutions, gaming studios can also quickly identify growth opportunities and trends with real-time insight into high performing monetization models and promotions. Mobile Gaming Company Reduces Revenue Losses from Technical Incident One mobile gaming company suffered a massive loss when a bug in a software update disrupted a marketing promotion in progress. The promotion involved automatically pushing special offers and opportunities for in-app purchases across various gaming and marketing channels. When a bug in an update disrupted the promotions process, the analytics team couldn’t take immediate action because they were unaware of the issue. Their monitoring process was ad hoc, relying on the manual review of multiple dashboards, and unfortunately, by the time they discovered the problem, it was too late. The result was a massive loss for the company – a loss of users, a loss of installations, and in the end, more than 15% revenue loss from in-app purchases. The company needed a more efficient and timely way to track its cross-promotional metrics, installations, and revenue. A machine learning-based approach, like Anodot’s AI-powered gaming analytics, provides notifications in real-time to quickly find and react to any breakdowns in the system and would have prevented the worst of the impacts. Anodot’s AI-Powered Analytics for Gaming The difference between success and failure is how companies respond to the ocean of data generated by their games and their users. Anodot’s AI-powered Gaming Analytics solutions can learn expected behavior in the complex gaming universe across all permutations of gaming, including devices, levels, user segments, pricing, and ads. Anodot’s Gaming AI platform is specifically designed to monitor millions of gaming metrics and help ensure a seamless gaming experience. Anodot monitors every critical metric and establishes a baseline of standard behavior patterns to quickly alert teams to anomalies that might represent issues or opportunities. Analytics teams see how new features impact user behavior, with clear, contextual alerts for spikes, drops, purchases, and app store reviews without the need to comb over dashboards trying to find helpful information. The online gaming space represents one of the more recent areas where rapid data collection and analysis can provide a competitive differentiation. Studios using AI powered analytics will keep themselves and their players ahead of the game.

Read More
Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Leveraging Big Data for Competitive Advantage: Benefits

Article | July 18, 2023

Explore the complexities of integrating Big Data into your organization. Learn effective strategies for overcoming challenges to optimize your data integration process and maximize business outcomes. Contents 1 Introduction 2 Challenges in Big Data Integration 2.1 Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety Challenges 2.2 Integration with Legacy Systems and Data Silos 2.3 Technical Challenges 2.4 Organizational Challenges 3 Overcoming Integration Challenges: Strategies 3.1 Conducting Thorough Analysis of Data Infrastructure 3.2 Prioritizing Projects Based On Business Needs 3.3 Implementing Scalable and Flexible Solutions 3.4 Establishing Robust Data Governance Practices 4 Conclusion 1. Introduction Big data integration is a critical component of effective data management for organizations of all sizes. While some CIOs may believe that consolidating legacy data sources into a single platform can solve integration challenges, the reality is often more complex. Data is vast and usually spread across multiple sources, making integration a daunting task. Nearly 25% of businesses struggle with integrating new applications with their old systems. That’s because legacy system integration isn’t always easy to achieve. (Source: Gartner) Thus, to tackle big data integration effectively, it's essential to understand how it fits into the organization's overall data management strategy and determine the policies governing the integration process. In addition, there are several technical challenges involved in data integration, including ensuring all components work well together, reflecting trends in big data analytics, and finding skilled big data engineers and analysts. 2. Challenges in Big Data Integration 2.1 Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety Challenges In order to effectively integrate big data, companies must address the three key components of volume, variety, and velocity. Coordinating and managing massive amounts of data is both logistically challenging and costly, especially with large volumes. Working with multiple data sources is also a major hurdle that necessitates advanced analytics resources and expertise. Large datasets can take weeks to process, making real-time data analytics an arduous task. This becomes particularly challenging when dealing with intricate and extensive datasets, where velocity poses a significant obstacle. Attempting to apply a uniform analytical process to all data sets may be impractical, further impeding progress. 2.2 Integration with Legacy Systems and Data Silos According to a report, 25% of organizations have more than 50 unique data silos, and these prevent companies from harnessing their data for their business. (Source: 451 Research) The integration of legacy systems presents a significant challenge for companies, as it entails various difficulties, such as high maintenance costs, data silos, compliance issues, weaker data security, and a lack of integration with new systems. The maintenance of legacy systems is both expensive and futile, leaving a company with outdated technology and a tarnished reputation due to potential breaches. Furthermore, legacy systems may fail to meet evolving compliance regulations such as GDPR and lack appropriate data security measures. Over time, data silos can develop due to organizational structures and company culture, leading to difficulties in achieving effective data integration. Siloed data obstructs departments from accessing the full benefits of new systems, impeding technological growth within a company. Additionally, legacy systems may not be compatible with new systems, causing further communication issues. 2.3 Technical Challenges Selecting the Right Big Data Integration Tools Choosing the right tools, technologies and big data integration services is crucial to meet specific business needs. It can be challenging to keep up with the constantly evolving technology landscape, making it important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations. The decision-making process should involve a thorough evaluation of existing tools and technologies to determine their effectiveness and relevance to the integration process. Failure to choose the appropriate tools and technologies can lead to inefficiencies, longer processing times, and increased costs. Ensuring Different Systems and Data Formats Compatibility It is estimated that around 85% of big data projects will fail to meet all their objectives, illustrating the scale of the challenge that businesses face when trying to get a handle on complex and disparate data from across the enterprise. (Source: Gartner) In integrating big data, it is common to have different systems and data formats that need to be integrated. Ensuring compatibility between these different systems and data formats can be a challenge. A solution-based approach to this challenge is to use data integration platforms that provide support for a wide range of data formats and systems. This ensures that the integration process is seamless and efficient. Addressing Issues of Data Quality and Completeness To integrate big data successfully, it's essential to address issues related to data quality and completeness. Only accurate or complete data can lead to correct insights and precise decision-making, which can benefit businesses. Developing comprehensive data quality management strategies that include data profiling, cleansing, and validation is necessary to overcome this challenge. These strategies ensure that the data being integrated is accurate and complete, leading to better actionable insights and business intelligence. 2.4 Organizational Challenges Developing Comprehensive Integration Strategy Developing a clear and comprehensive integration strategy for big data can be challenging, but it is essential for success. The developed strategy should clearly outline the business objectives and the scope of the integration effort as well as identify the key stakeholders involved. Additionally, it should define the technical requirements and resources necessary to support the integration effort. Building Cross-Functional Teams to Support Integration Efforts Building cross-functional teams for successful data integration can be challenging due to identifying the right individuals with diverse skill sets and navigating complex technical environments. However, it is crucial to form teams comprising members from various departments, including IT, data science, and administration, who collaborate to identify business needs, devise an integration strategy, and implement integration solutions. Building such teams promotes effective communication and coordination across departments and stakeholders, enabling organizations to leverage data assets effectively. 3. Overcoming Integration Challenges: Strategies 3.1 Conducting Thorough Analysis of Data Infrastructure Conducting a thorough analysis of existing data infrastructure and systems is the first step in any data integration effort. This analysis should identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing infrastructure and systems. This information can be used to develop a comprehensive integration strategy that addresses existing challenges and identifies opportunities for improvement. 3.2 Prioritizing Projects Based On Business Needs It is crucial to prioritize, and sequence integration projects based on business needs to leverage the benefits of data integration. This approach ensures that resources are allocated appropriately and the most critical projects are addressed first. Conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis is an effective way to determine the value and impact of each project to prioritize and plan accordingly. 3.3 Implementing Scalable and Flexible Solutions In orderto accommodate the ever-increasing amount of data and evolving business requirements, it is essential to implement scalable and flexible integration solutions. This approach ensures that the integration process remains efficient and can adapt to changing needs. Modern data integration platforms that support cloud-based solutions, real-time data processing, and flexible data models can be adopted to achieve this. 3.4 Establishing Robust Data Governance Practices Establishing robust data governance practices ensures data is managed effectively throughout the integration process. This involves defining clear policies, procedures, and standards for data management across the entire data lifecycle, from acquisition to disposition. Additionally, data quality and security controls should be implemented, and employees must be trained on data governance best practices. Organizations can effectively manage data by establishing these practices throughout the integration process. It includes defining data ownership, establishing policies, and implementing quality controls. Ultimately, this approach ensures that data is accurate, complete, and reliable and that the organization is compliant with any relevant regulations or standards. 4. Conclusion Integrating big data represents a formidable obstacle for many organizations, yet with the proper strategies in place, these challenges can be surmounted, enabling businesses to unleash the full potential of their data assets. It is paramount that organizations possess a comprehensive and lucid understanding of both the technical and organizational challenges inherent in integrating big data. Businesses must prioritize data integration and processing initiatives based on their commercial requirements, employ scalable and flexible solutions, and establish robust data governance practices. By doing so, they can acquire invaluable insights that drive business growth and innovation, improve operational efficiency, and enhance their competitiveness in the market.

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Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Big Data in Healthcare: Improving Patient Outcomes

Article | April 27, 2023

Explore the impact of big data on the healthcare industry and how it is being used to improve patient outcomes. Discover how big data is being leveraged to enhance overall healthcare delivery. Contents 1. Introduction 1.1 Role of Big Data in Healthcare 1.2 The Importance of Patient Outcomes 2. How Big Data Improves Patient Outcomes 2.1 Personalized Medicine and Treatment Plans 2.2 Early Disease Detection and Prevention 2.3 Improved Patient Safety and Reduced Medical Errors 3. Challenges and Considerations While Using Big Data in Healthcare 4. Final thoughts 1. Introduction In today's constantly evolving healthcare industry, the significance of big data cannot be overstated. Its multifaceted nature makes it a valuable asset to healthcare providers in their efforts to enhance patient outcomes and reduce business costs. When harnessed effectively, big data in healthcare provides companies with the insights they need to personalize healthcare, streamline customer service processes, and improve their practices for interacting with patients. This results in a more tailored and thorough experience for customers, ultimately leading to better care. 1.1 Role of Big Data in Healthcare Big data pertains to vast collections of structured and unstructured data in the healthcare industry. One of the primary sources of big data in healthcare is electronic health records (EHRs), which contain: Patient’s medical history Demographics Medications Test results Analyzing this data can: Facilitate informed decision-making Improve patient outcomes Reduce healthcare costs Integrating structured and unstructured data can add significant value to healthcare organizations, and Big Data Analytics (BDA) is the tool used to extract information from big data. Big Data Analytics (BDA) can extract information and create trends, and in healthcare, it can identify clusters, correlations, and predictive models from large datasets. However, privacy and security concerns and ensuring data accuracy and reliability are significant challenges that must be addressed. 1.2 The Importance of Patient Outcomes Patient outcomes are the consequences of healthcare interventions or treatments on a patient's health status and are essential in evaluating healthcare systems and guiding healthcare decision-making. However, the current healthcare system's focus on volume rather than value has led to fragmented payment and delivery systems that fall short in terms of quality, outcomes, costs, and equity. To overcome these shortcomings, a learning healthcare system is necessary to continuously apply knowledge for improved patient outcomes and affordability. However, access to timely guidance is limited, and organizational and technological limitations pose significant challenges in measuring patient-centered outcomes. 2. How Big Data Improves Patient Outcomes Big data in healthcare engenders a substantial impact by facilitating the delivery of treatment that is both efficient and effective. This innovative approach to healthcare enables the identification of high-risk patients, prediction of disease outbreaks, management of hospital performance, and improvement of treatment effectiveness. Thanks to modern technology, the collection of electronic data is now a seamless process, thus empowering healthcare professionals to create data-driven solutions to improve patient outcomes. 2.1 Personalized Medicine and Treatment Plans Big data can revolutionize personalized medicine and treatment plans by analyzing vast patient data to create tailored treatment plans for each patient, resulting in better outcomes, fewer side effects, and faster recovery times. 2.2 Early Disease Detection and Prevention Big data analytics in healthcare allow for early interventions and treatments by identifying patterns and trends that indicate disease onset. This improves patient outcomes and reduces healthcare costs. Real-time patient data monitoring and predictive analytics enable timely action to prevent complications. 2.3 Improved Patient Safety and Reduced Medical Errors Big data analytics can help healthcare providers identify safety risks like medication errors, misdiagnoses, and adverse reactions, improving patient safety and reducing medical errors. This can lead to cost savings and better patient outcomes. 3. Challenges and Considerations While Using Big Data in Healthcare In order to maximize the potential advantages, organizations must address significant challenges of big data in healthcare, like privacy and security concerns, data accuracy and reliability, and expertise and technology requirements. Safeguards like encryption, access controls, and data de-identification can mitigate privacy and security risks Ensuring data accuracy and reliability requires standardized data collection, cleaning, and validation procedures Additionally, healthcare organizations must prioritize the recruitment of qualified professionals with expertise in data management, and analysis is crucial The adoption of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can support effective analysis and interpretation of big data in healthcare 4. Final Thoughts The impact of big data on healthcare is profound, and the healthcare sector possesses the possibility of a paradigm shift by leveraging the potential of big data to augment patient outcomes and curtail costs. Nevertheless, implementing big data entails formidable challenges that necessitate their resolution to fully unleash healthcare data technology's benefits. Notably, handling voluminous and heterogeneous datasets in real time requires state-of-the-art technological solutions. To attain the maximal benefits of big data in healthcare, organizations must proactively address these challenges by implementing risk-mitigating measures and fully capitalizing on big data's potential.

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Sigma and Connect&GO Redefine Data Analytics for Attraction Industry

Sigma Computing | November 07, 2023

Sigma and Connect&GO have recently introduced the new Connect&GO reporting tool, an advanced embedded analytics solution that empowers attractions worldwide to enhance operational efficiency, boost revenue, and evaluate their data in real-time. This no-code platform, a result of Sigma's cloud analytics expertise and Connect&GO's integrated technology, offers an intuitive and customizable dashboard for real-time data insights. It simplifies data analytics, reporting, and sharing, making it suitable for a wide range of attractions industry customers, including marketing, finance, and operations managers, as well as C-suite executives. The new Connect&GO reporting tool equips attractions industry customers with the ability to make informed decisions through customizable dashboards. Operators can effortlessly upload data sets, such as forecasts and projections from various systems, and compare them in real-time with actual data, including budgets. This live data and insights allow them to delve into the granular details of their business, enabling them to address day-to-day challenges, compare data sets, and plan for the future more accurately. These capabilities enable attractions to improve guest satisfaction, foster collaboration, ease the burden on engineering teams, and ultimately generate new revenue streams. For instance, park management can use better data to predict attendance, adjust staffing levels as needed, and ensure appropriate retail, food, and beverage inventory to enhance the guest experience. Sigma has rapidly established itself as a go-to cloud analytics platform, experiencing significant growth over the past years and earning numerous awards, including Snowflake BI Partner of the Year 2023. Sigma's success can be attributed to its mission of removing traditional barriers to data access and empowering business users to extract maximum value from live data without requiring technical expertise. Platform users can directly access and manage data stored in a cloud data warehouse without the involvement of a data team. With a familiar and intuitive interface, they can easily explore data and test different scenarios, gaining new insights and the context needed for decision-making. In contrast to legacy technology platforms that keep data isolated and operations disjointed, Connect&GO's cutting-edge solution, Konnect, is a fully integrated system that enables operators to oversee every aspect of their business seamlessly. This platform uniquely provides operators with real-time data, making it effortless to manage eCommerce, access control, point-of-sale, and cashless payments through proprietary Virtual Wallet technology. With its configurable interface and connected RFID wearables, Konnect enables operators to curate premium guest experiences that drive revenue and enhance engagement. About Sigma Computing Sigma Computing is a prominent cloud analytics solutions provider, offering business users seamless access to their cloud data warehouse for effortless exploration and insight gathering. With its intuitive spreadsheet-like interface, Sigma eliminates the need for coding or specialized training, enabling users to effortlessly navigate vast datasets, augment them with new information, and conduct real-time 'what if' analyses on billions of rows of data. About Connect&GO Connect&GO is a leading integrated technology and RFID solutions provider for the attractions industry. Its flexible operations management platform seamlessly integrates e-commerce, food & beverage, point-of-sale, access control, RFID, and cashless payments using its proprietary Virtual Wallet technology, consolidating all data in one place. The company helps drive revenue and maximize guest engagement with valuable real-time data insights. Connect&GO serves amusement and water parks, family entertainment centers, zoos & aquariums, and other attractions worldwide, integrating user-friendly wearable technology into extraordinary experiences.

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Data Science

Snowflake Accelerates How Users Build Next Generation Apps and Machine Learning Models in the Data Cloud

Business Wire | November 03, 2023

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the Data Cloud company, today announced at its Snowday 2023 event new advancements that make it easier for developers to build machine learning (ML) models and full-stack apps in the Data Cloud. Snowflake is enhancing its Python capabilities through Snowpark to boost productivity, increase collaboration, and ultimately speed up end-to-end AI and ML workflows. In addition, with support for containerized workloads and expanded DevOps capabilities, developers can now accelerate development and run apps — all within Snowflake's secure and fully managed infrastructure. “The rise of generative AI has made organizations’ most valuable asset, their data, even more indispensable. Snowflake is making it easier for developers to put that data to work so they can build powerful end-to-end machine learning models and full-stack apps natively in the Data Cloud,” said Prasanna Krishnan, Senior Director of Product Management, Snowflake. “With Snowflake Marketplace as the first cross-cloud marketplace for data and apps in the industry, customers can quickly and securely productionize what they’ve built to global end users, unlocking increased monetization, discoverability, and usage.” Developers Gain Robust and Familiar Functionality for End-to-End Machine Learning Snowflake is continuing to invest in Snowpark as its secure deployment and processing of non-SQL code, with over 35% of Snowflake customers using Snowpark on a weekly basis (as of September 2023). Developers increasingly look to Snowpark for complex ML model development and deployment, and Snowflake is introducing expanded functionality that makes Snowpark even more accessible and powerful for all Python developers. New advancements include: Snowflake Notebooks (private preview): Snowflake Notebooks are a new development interface that offers an interactive, cell-based programming environment for Python and SQL users to explore, process, and experiment with data in Snowpark. Snowflake’s built-in notebooks allow developers to write and execute code, train and deploy models using Snowpark ML, visualize results with Streamlit chart elements, and much more — all within Snowflake’s unified, secure platform. Snowpark ML Modeling API (general availability soon): Snowflake’s Snowpark ML Modeling API empowers developers and data scientists to scale out feature engineering and simplify model training for faster and more intuitive model development in Snowflake. Users can implement popular AI and ML frameworks natively on data in Snowflake, without having to create stored procedures. Snowpark ML Operations Enhancements: The Snowpark Model Registry (public preview soon) now builds on a native Snowflake model entity and enables the scalable, secure deployment and management of models in Snowflake, including expanded support for deep learning models and open source large language models (LLMs) from Hugging Face. Snowflake is also providing developers with an integrated Snowflake Feature Store (private preview) that creates, stores, manages, and serves ML features for model training and inference. Endeavor, the global sports and entertainment company that includes the WME Agency, IMG & On Location, UFC, and more, relies on Snowflake’s Snowpark for Python capabilities to build and deploy ML models that create highly personalized experiences and apps for fan engagement. Snowpark serves as the driving force behind our end-to-end machine learning development, powering how we centralize and process data across our various entities, and then securely build and train models using that data to create hyper-personalized fan experiences at scale, said Saad Zaheer, VP of Data Science and Engineering, Endeavor. With Snowflake as our central data foundation bringing all of this development directly to our enterprise data, we can unlock even more ways to predict and forecast customer behavior to fuel our targeted sales and marketing engines. Snowflake Advances Developer Capabilities Across the App Lifecycle The Snowflake Native App Framework (general availability soon on AWS, public preview soon on Azure) now provides every organization with the necessary building blocks for app development, including distribution, operation, and monetization within Snowflake’s platform. Leading organizations are monetizing their Snowflake Native Apps through Snowflake Marketplace, with app listings more than doubling since Snowflake Summit 2023. This number is only growing as Snowflake continues to advance its developer capabilities across the app lifecycle so more organizations can unlock business impact. For example, Cybersyn, a data-service provider, is developing Snowflake Native Apps exclusively for Snowflake Marketplace, with more than 40 customers running over 5,000 queries with its Financial & Economic Essentials Native App since June 2022. In addition, LiveRamp, a data collaboration platform, has seen the number of customers deploying its Identity Resolution and Transcoding Snowflake Native App through Snowflake Marketplace increase by more than 80% since June 2022. Lastly, SNP has been able to provide its customers with a 10x cost reduction in Snowflake data processing associated with SAP data ingestion, empowering them to drastically reduce data latency while improving SAP data availability in Snowflake through SNP’s Data Streaming for SAP - Snowflake Native App. With Snowpark Container Services (public preview soon in select AWS regions), developers can run any component of their app — from ML training, to LLMs, to an API, and more — without needing to move data or manage complex container-based infrastructure. Snowflake Automates DevOps for Apps, Data Pipelines, and Other Development Snowflake is giving developers new ways to automate key DevOps and observability capabilities across testing, deploying, monitoring, and operating their apps and data pipelines — so they can take them from idea to production faster. With Snowflake’s new Database Change Management (private preview soon) features, developers can code declaratively and easily templatize their work to manage Snowflake objects across multiple environments. The Database Change Management features serve as a single source of truth for object creation across various environments, using the common “configuration as code” pattern in DevOps to automatically provision and update Snowflake objects. Snowflake also unveiled a new Powered by Snowflake Funding Program, innovations that enable all users to securely tap into the power of generative AI with their enterprise data, enhancements to further eliminate data silos and strengthen Snowflake’s leading compliance and governance capabilities through Snowflake Horizon, and more at Snowday 2023.

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Big Data Management

NetApp Empowers Secure Cloud Sovereignty with StorageGRID

NetApp | November 08, 2023

NetApp introduces StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud, enhancing data storage and security for sovereign cloud customers. NetApp's Object Storage plugin for VMware Cloud Director enables seamless integration of StorageGRID for secure Object Storage for unstructured data. NetApp's Sovereign Cloud integration ensures data sovereignty, security, and data value while adhering to regulatory standards. NetApp, a prominent global cloud-led, data-centric software company, has recently introduced NetApp StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud. This NetApp plugin offering for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension empowers sovereign cloud customers to cost-efficiently secure, store, protect, and preserve unstructured data while adhering to global data privacy and residency regulations. Additionally, NetApp has also unveiled the latest release of NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware vSphere (OTV 10.0), which is designed to streamline and centralize enterprise data management within multi-tenant vSphere environments. The concept of sovereignty has emerged as a vital facet of cloud computing for entities that handle highly sensitive data, including national and state governments, as well as tightly regulated sectors like finance and healthcare. In this context, national governments are increasingly exploring ways to enhance their digital economic capabilities and reduce their reliance on multinational corporations for cloud services. NetApp's newly introduced Object Storage plugin for VMware Cloud Director offers Cloud Service Providers a seamless means to integrate StorageGRID as their primary Object Storage solution to provide secure Object Storage for unstructured data to their customers. This integration provides StorageGRID services into the familiar VMware Cloud Director user interface, thereby minimizing training requirements and accelerating time to revenue for partners. A noteworthy feature of StorageGRID is its universal compatibility and native support for industry-standard APIs, such as the Amazon S3 API, facilitating smooth interoperability across diverse cloud environments. Enhanced functionalities like automated lifecycle management further ensure cost-effective data protection, storage, and high availability for unstructured data within VMware environments. The integration of NetApp's Sovereign Cloud with Cloud Director empowers providers to offer customers: Robust assurance that sensitive data, including metadata, remains under sovereign control, safeguarding against potential access by foreign authorities that may infringe upon data privacy laws. Heightened security and compliance measures that protect applications and data from evolving cybersecurity threats, all while maintaining continuous compliance with infrastructure, trusted local, established frameworks, and local experts. A future-proof infrastructure capable of swiftly reacting to evolving data privacy regulations, security challenges, and geopolitical dynamics. The ability to unlock the value of data through secure data sharing and analysis, fostering innovation without compromising privacy laws and ensuring data integrity to derive accurate insights. VMware Sovereign Cloud providers are dedicated to designing and operating cloud solutions rooted in modern, software-defined architectures that embody the core principles and best practices outlined in the VMware Sovereign Cloud framework. Workloads within VMware Sovereign Cloud environments are often characterized by a diverse range of data sets, including transactional workloads and substantial volumes of unstructured data, all requiring cost-effective and integrated management that is compliant with regulated standards for sovereign and regulated customers. In addition to the aforementioned advancements, NetApp also announced a collaborative effort with VMware aimed at modernizing API integrations between NetApp ONTAP and VMware vSphere. This integration empowers VMware administrators to streamline the management and operations of NetApp ONTAP-based data management platforms within multi-tenant vSphere environments, all while allowing users to leverage a new micro-services-based architecture that offers enhanced scalability and availability. With the latest releases of NetApp ONTAP and ONTAP Tools for vSphere, NetApp has significantly made protection, provisioning, and securing modern VMware environments at scale faster and easier, all while maintaining a centralized point of visibility and control through vSphere. NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware provides two key benefits to customers: A redefined architecture featuring VMware vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) integration, simplifying policy-driven operations and enabling cloud-like scalability. An automation-enabled framework driven by an API-first approach, allowing IT teams to seamlessly integrate with existing tools and construct end-to-end workflows for easy consumption of features and capabilities.

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Big Data Management

Sigma and Connect&GO Redefine Data Analytics for Attraction Industry

Sigma Computing | November 07, 2023

Sigma and Connect&GO have recently introduced the new Connect&GO reporting tool, an advanced embedded analytics solution that empowers attractions worldwide to enhance operational efficiency, boost revenue, and evaluate their data in real-time. This no-code platform, a result of Sigma's cloud analytics expertise and Connect&GO's integrated technology, offers an intuitive and customizable dashboard for real-time data insights. It simplifies data analytics, reporting, and sharing, making it suitable for a wide range of attractions industry customers, including marketing, finance, and operations managers, as well as C-suite executives. The new Connect&GO reporting tool equips attractions industry customers with the ability to make informed decisions through customizable dashboards. Operators can effortlessly upload data sets, such as forecasts and projections from various systems, and compare them in real-time with actual data, including budgets. This live data and insights allow them to delve into the granular details of their business, enabling them to address day-to-day challenges, compare data sets, and plan for the future more accurately. These capabilities enable attractions to improve guest satisfaction, foster collaboration, ease the burden on engineering teams, and ultimately generate new revenue streams. For instance, park management can use better data to predict attendance, adjust staffing levels as needed, and ensure appropriate retail, food, and beverage inventory to enhance the guest experience. Sigma has rapidly established itself as a go-to cloud analytics platform, experiencing significant growth over the past years and earning numerous awards, including Snowflake BI Partner of the Year 2023. Sigma's success can be attributed to its mission of removing traditional barriers to data access and empowering business users to extract maximum value from live data without requiring technical expertise. Platform users can directly access and manage data stored in a cloud data warehouse without the involvement of a data team. With a familiar and intuitive interface, they can easily explore data and test different scenarios, gaining new insights and the context needed for decision-making. In contrast to legacy technology platforms that keep data isolated and operations disjointed, Connect&GO's cutting-edge solution, Konnect, is a fully integrated system that enables operators to oversee every aspect of their business seamlessly. This platform uniquely provides operators with real-time data, making it effortless to manage eCommerce, access control, point-of-sale, and cashless payments through proprietary Virtual Wallet technology. With its configurable interface and connected RFID wearables, Konnect enables operators to curate premium guest experiences that drive revenue and enhance engagement. About Sigma Computing Sigma Computing is a prominent cloud analytics solutions provider, offering business users seamless access to their cloud data warehouse for effortless exploration and insight gathering. With its intuitive spreadsheet-like interface, Sigma eliminates the need for coding or specialized training, enabling users to effortlessly navigate vast datasets, augment them with new information, and conduct real-time 'what if' analyses on billions of rows of data. About Connect&GO Connect&GO is a leading integrated technology and RFID solutions provider for the attractions industry. Its flexible operations management platform seamlessly integrates e-commerce, food & beverage, point-of-sale, access control, RFID, and cashless payments using its proprietary Virtual Wallet technology, consolidating all data in one place. The company helps drive revenue and maximize guest engagement with valuable real-time data insights. Connect&GO serves amusement and water parks, family entertainment centers, zoos & aquariums, and other attractions worldwide, integrating user-friendly wearable technology into extraordinary experiences.

Read More

Data Science

Snowflake Accelerates How Users Build Next Generation Apps and Machine Learning Models in the Data Cloud

Business Wire | November 03, 2023

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the Data Cloud company, today announced at its Snowday 2023 event new advancements that make it easier for developers to build machine learning (ML) models and full-stack apps in the Data Cloud. Snowflake is enhancing its Python capabilities through Snowpark to boost productivity, increase collaboration, and ultimately speed up end-to-end AI and ML workflows. In addition, with support for containerized workloads and expanded DevOps capabilities, developers can now accelerate development and run apps — all within Snowflake's secure and fully managed infrastructure. “The rise of generative AI has made organizations’ most valuable asset, their data, even more indispensable. Snowflake is making it easier for developers to put that data to work so they can build powerful end-to-end machine learning models and full-stack apps natively in the Data Cloud,” said Prasanna Krishnan, Senior Director of Product Management, Snowflake. “With Snowflake Marketplace as the first cross-cloud marketplace for data and apps in the industry, customers can quickly and securely productionize what they’ve built to global end users, unlocking increased monetization, discoverability, and usage.” Developers Gain Robust and Familiar Functionality for End-to-End Machine Learning Snowflake is continuing to invest in Snowpark as its secure deployment and processing of non-SQL code, with over 35% of Snowflake customers using Snowpark on a weekly basis (as of September 2023). Developers increasingly look to Snowpark for complex ML model development and deployment, and Snowflake is introducing expanded functionality that makes Snowpark even more accessible and powerful for all Python developers. New advancements include: Snowflake Notebooks (private preview): Snowflake Notebooks are a new development interface that offers an interactive, cell-based programming environment for Python and SQL users to explore, process, and experiment with data in Snowpark. Snowflake’s built-in notebooks allow developers to write and execute code, train and deploy models using Snowpark ML, visualize results with Streamlit chart elements, and much more — all within Snowflake’s unified, secure platform. Snowpark ML Modeling API (general availability soon): Snowflake’s Snowpark ML Modeling API empowers developers and data scientists to scale out feature engineering and simplify model training for faster and more intuitive model development in Snowflake. Users can implement popular AI and ML frameworks natively on data in Snowflake, without having to create stored procedures. Snowpark ML Operations Enhancements: The Snowpark Model Registry (public preview soon) now builds on a native Snowflake model entity and enables the scalable, secure deployment and management of models in Snowflake, including expanded support for deep learning models and open source large language models (LLMs) from Hugging Face. Snowflake is also providing developers with an integrated Snowflake Feature Store (private preview) that creates, stores, manages, and serves ML features for model training and inference. Endeavor, the global sports and entertainment company that includes the WME Agency, IMG & On Location, UFC, and more, relies on Snowflake’s Snowpark for Python capabilities to build and deploy ML models that create highly personalized experiences and apps for fan engagement. Snowpark serves as the driving force behind our end-to-end machine learning development, powering how we centralize and process data across our various entities, and then securely build and train models using that data to create hyper-personalized fan experiences at scale, said Saad Zaheer, VP of Data Science and Engineering, Endeavor. With Snowflake as our central data foundation bringing all of this development directly to our enterprise data, we can unlock even more ways to predict and forecast customer behavior to fuel our targeted sales and marketing engines. Snowflake Advances Developer Capabilities Across the App Lifecycle The Snowflake Native App Framework (general availability soon on AWS, public preview soon on Azure) now provides every organization with the necessary building blocks for app development, including distribution, operation, and monetization within Snowflake’s platform. Leading organizations are monetizing their Snowflake Native Apps through Snowflake Marketplace, with app listings more than doubling since Snowflake Summit 2023. This number is only growing as Snowflake continues to advance its developer capabilities across the app lifecycle so more organizations can unlock business impact. For example, Cybersyn, a data-service provider, is developing Snowflake Native Apps exclusively for Snowflake Marketplace, with more than 40 customers running over 5,000 queries with its Financial & Economic Essentials Native App since June 2022. In addition, LiveRamp, a data collaboration platform, has seen the number of customers deploying its Identity Resolution and Transcoding Snowflake Native App through Snowflake Marketplace increase by more than 80% since June 2022. Lastly, SNP has been able to provide its customers with a 10x cost reduction in Snowflake data processing associated with SAP data ingestion, empowering them to drastically reduce data latency while improving SAP data availability in Snowflake through SNP’s Data Streaming for SAP - Snowflake Native App. With Snowpark Container Services (public preview soon in select AWS regions), developers can run any component of their app — from ML training, to LLMs, to an API, and more — without needing to move data or manage complex container-based infrastructure. Snowflake Automates DevOps for Apps, Data Pipelines, and Other Development Snowflake is giving developers new ways to automate key DevOps and observability capabilities across testing, deploying, monitoring, and operating their apps and data pipelines — so they can take them from idea to production faster. With Snowflake’s new Database Change Management (private preview soon) features, developers can code declaratively and easily templatize their work to manage Snowflake objects across multiple environments. The Database Change Management features serve as a single source of truth for object creation across various environments, using the common “configuration as code” pattern in DevOps to automatically provision and update Snowflake objects. Snowflake also unveiled a new Powered by Snowflake Funding Program, innovations that enable all users to securely tap into the power of generative AI with their enterprise data, enhancements to further eliminate data silos and strengthen Snowflake’s leading compliance and governance capabilities through Snowflake Horizon, and more at Snowday 2023.

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Big Data Management

NetApp Empowers Secure Cloud Sovereignty with StorageGRID

NetApp | November 08, 2023

NetApp introduces StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud, enhancing data storage and security for sovereign cloud customers. NetApp's Object Storage plugin for VMware Cloud Director enables seamless integration of StorageGRID for secure Object Storage for unstructured data. NetApp's Sovereign Cloud integration ensures data sovereignty, security, and data value while adhering to regulatory standards. NetApp, a prominent global cloud-led, data-centric software company, has recently introduced NetApp StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud. This NetApp plugin offering for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension empowers sovereign cloud customers to cost-efficiently secure, store, protect, and preserve unstructured data while adhering to global data privacy and residency regulations. Additionally, NetApp has also unveiled the latest release of NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware vSphere (OTV 10.0), which is designed to streamline and centralize enterprise data management within multi-tenant vSphere environments. The concept of sovereignty has emerged as a vital facet of cloud computing for entities that handle highly sensitive data, including national and state governments, as well as tightly regulated sectors like finance and healthcare. In this context, national governments are increasingly exploring ways to enhance their digital economic capabilities and reduce their reliance on multinational corporations for cloud services. NetApp's newly introduced Object Storage plugin for VMware Cloud Director offers Cloud Service Providers a seamless means to integrate StorageGRID as their primary Object Storage solution to provide secure Object Storage for unstructured data to their customers. This integration provides StorageGRID services into the familiar VMware Cloud Director user interface, thereby minimizing training requirements and accelerating time to revenue for partners. A noteworthy feature of StorageGRID is its universal compatibility and native support for industry-standard APIs, such as the Amazon S3 API, facilitating smooth interoperability across diverse cloud environments. Enhanced functionalities like automated lifecycle management further ensure cost-effective data protection, storage, and high availability for unstructured data within VMware environments. The integration of NetApp's Sovereign Cloud with Cloud Director empowers providers to offer customers: Robust assurance that sensitive data, including metadata, remains under sovereign control, safeguarding against potential access by foreign authorities that may infringe upon data privacy laws. Heightened security and compliance measures that protect applications and data from evolving cybersecurity threats, all while maintaining continuous compliance with infrastructure, trusted local, established frameworks, and local experts. A future-proof infrastructure capable of swiftly reacting to evolving data privacy regulations, security challenges, and geopolitical dynamics. The ability to unlock the value of data through secure data sharing and analysis, fostering innovation without compromising privacy laws and ensuring data integrity to derive accurate insights. VMware Sovereign Cloud providers are dedicated to designing and operating cloud solutions rooted in modern, software-defined architectures that embody the core principles and best practices outlined in the VMware Sovereign Cloud framework. Workloads within VMware Sovereign Cloud environments are often characterized by a diverse range of data sets, including transactional workloads and substantial volumes of unstructured data, all requiring cost-effective and integrated management that is compliant with regulated standards for sovereign and regulated customers. In addition to the aforementioned advancements, NetApp also announced a collaborative effort with VMware aimed at modernizing API integrations between NetApp ONTAP and VMware vSphere. This integration empowers VMware administrators to streamline the management and operations of NetApp ONTAP-based data management platforms within multi-tenant vSphere environments, all while allowing users to leverage a new micro-services-based architecture that offers enhanced scalability and availability. With the latest releases of NetApp ONTAP and ONTAP Tools for vSphere, NetApp has significantly made protection, provisioning, and securing modern VMware environments at scale faster and easier, all while maintaining a centralized point of visibility and control through vSphere. NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware provides two key benefits to customers: A redefined architecture featuring VMware vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) integration, simplifying policy-driven operations and enabling cloud-like scalability. An automation-enabled framework driven by an API-first approach, allowing IT teams to seamlessly integrate with existing tools and construct end-to-end workflows for easy consumption of features and capabilities.

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