In the age of cloud-based applications and anytime access across many devices, having digital security in place that’s smart, flexible, and reliable is essential. Every day, RSA sales reps help businesses meet these requirements with industry-leading security solutions, providing them with the peace of mind and confidence needed to be successful. RSA in turn wanted to give reps that same level of certainty about their compensation payouts so that they could move from deal to deal without having to worry about the accuracy of those numbers. Ironside’s Sales Performance Management (SPM) team partnered with RSA to help make this a reality. Read more
Ironside has placed the reins of our information management and data integration practice into the hands of one of our strongest data handling experts: Geoff Speare. Geoff will now be serving in a broader strategic and management capacity as our Practice Lead for Information Management. His deep expertise across both traditional and big data-oriented infrastructures, passion for bimodal analytics, and focus on governance make him the ideal thought leader to drive this part of our organization.
About Geoff
A long-time Ironside veteran, Geoff is an information management mastermind who can transform collections of data into solutions and architectures that keep businesses growing. The powerful integrations and data management strategies he creates show our clients that efficiently organized data is an invaluable asset improving all aspects of a business. Geoff works with tools from SSIS to PureData Systems for Analytics in order to provide the right answers for each client.
Geoff’s Specialties: Enterprise Data Architecture and Integration, Data Warehousing, Data Integration, Bimodal Analytics
Focus and Goals
Information Management Practice Lead is an apt title for Geoff, as many of the initiatives and solutions he’ll take on in his new role bring together elements from Ironside’s other practice areas.
“Information management is critical to all of the solutions that Ironside provides,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to helping businesses understand and solve the challenges they face in organizing and providing the right data to the right people. We’ve been doing this work for a long time at Ironside and have a lot of experience we can bring to bear.”
The infrastructure foundations that the Ironside Information Management team will build under Geoff’s leadership will provide the solid platform upon which organizations build their analytics strategies, meaning that their approaches need to be flexible enough to account for the many data handling options emerging in the modern landscape. Geoff is excited to take on all these different methods and make them a reality for our clients.
“Much more data is moving to the cloud now, which creates new challenges in putting it in one place for analysis,” he asserts. “Add to that the increased demands for timeliness and flexibility created by data discovery tools and the need for dynamic solutions is greater than it’s ever been. Businesses are shifting from warehouse-only architectures to approaches that can meet the requirements of bimodal analytics.”
This atmosphere of change opens up a wide array of opportunities to innovate in the information management and data integration space. Geoff sees this as a chance to get more people exposed to the behind-the-scenes processes they previously haven’t thought about and help them effectively control their environments.
“A lot of data movement is invisible to users – except when it doesn’t work,” he states. “Creating solutions that are easy to maintain and to understand is something I’ve done a lot of and believe very strongly in. I’ve seen many times the benefits of keeping all of these perspectives in mind, and look forward to bringing that approach to even more of Ironside’s clients.”
If you’d like to see more on how Geoff views information management, data integration, and business analytics, check out some of the articles he’s written. You can also check out our Information Management team page to see how Geoff and his team can help you take advantage of the information that’s critical to your organization’s success.
Cubes (including Cognos PowerCubes and Dynamic Cubes, as well as other file-based cube technologies) are well-known, commonly used, and valuable data sources in reporting. As specially indexed binary files, report performance with cubes is generally robust, however when cube files grow very large (or there is high simultaneous demand reading from the cube), response time can and will decrease. That’s why it can sometimes be useful to show cube sizes on BI reports to let authors know when a cube’s size could be affecting performance. Read more
The immense amount of data being collected today, in any industry, expands the reality of advanced analytics and data science. In concept, it creates an explosion of opportunities and expands what can be accomplished. In reality, we are often limited in scope by our data processing systems which may not be able to handle the complexity and quantity of data available to us. The introduction of Spark has offered a solution to this issue with a cluster computing platform that outperforms Hadoop. Its Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) allows for parallel processing on a distributed collection of objects enhancing the speed of data processing. For this reason, Spark has received a lot of interest and promotion in the world of big data and advanced analytics, and for good reason. Read more
Policing in the United States and around the world is rapidly changing. Just as there have been paradigm shifts in law enforcement procedures in the past, we are now on the brink of another transformation of how communities are policed. Current national narratives and recent events are motivating these changes, and like it or not, a new era of law enforcement is upon us. One of the main solutions that helps law enforcement adapt to this change is adopting a sound data driven policing strategy. Read more
On April 26th, Ironside hosted a webinar on Rolling Forecast Essentials. Members of our Financial Performance Management team, Mark Flyamer, Senior Consultant and Rich Canale, Solution Architect, discussed the foundation needed to start implementing rolling forecasts work at your organization.
Rich and Mark discussed design techniques to help you expedite rolling forecast models and minimize the hours needed to get a working solution all while preserving the accuracy and integrity of your financial data.
Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.