Thanks to the widespread availability of the cloud and the rampant growth of the remote options it enables, these days it feels like everyone is looking for a Managed Services Provider (MSP) to help manage different aspects of their environment. Whether they provide firewalls, antivirus solutions, or business analytics platforms, MSPs abound. There are many ways to assess what these providers bring the table, but what are the most important characteristics to look for? As a provider and consumer of these services, I know what I strive to offer and what I look for from my vendors. In this article, I’ll illuminate my thought process for you in the hopes that it can set you on the road to successful, rewarding MSP relationships. Read more
Tag Archive for: Strategy
In 2014, cloud data warehousing services led the information management category in increased adoption rate, jumping from 24% to 34% according to surveys by Information Week . For organizations challenged by data urgency needs that can be difficult to meet with traditional data warehouse infrastructures, cloud services offer an alternative that can provide value at the pace of business, often supplementing existing, on-premise data warehouses. With new technologies and advancements in the cloud data warehousing space, 2015 should prove to be an exciting year for those looking to build out or implement new cloud based DW programs. Whether you are in the midst of a cloud DW initiative, looking to start one soon, or just getting to know the technology – the five trends that we will discuss below are items you will want to keep in mind for the coming year. Read more
You might have missed it if you weren’t closely following the situation or already using the platform, but around the middle of last month IBM forever changed the concept of self-service analytics when they quietly moved Watson Analytics out of beta and into general availability. Watson Analytics is a new cloud-based application that enables an individual to work with their data at a level of ease and intuitiveness that we’ve not seen before. As a sibling of the IBM Watson family, it has inherited a powerful natural language processing capability and as such it enables an individual to query data not with a programming language like SQL, but in the form of a natural language dialogue. Read more
The report is in! See the list of topics that readers, like you, found most interesting and that made it into our top 5 of 2014.
Top Training Tip
Creating a Burst Table for a Cognos Report – Do you know how to create an external data file to use as a burst table for a Cognos report? If not, you can find step-by-step instructions in this guide. Learn how to create a Burst Table Read more
Why do I Care? It’s a simple question that is crucial to whether or not your idea sells, but it is frequently overlooked. Professional salesperson or not, we all have a degree of selling in our lives whether it’s convincing the kids to run errands with you or convincing a client to adopt one of your ideas. Read more
In our never-ending quest to provide best-in-class managed business analytics to their diverse portfolio of customers, Ironside is pleased to announce we have entered into a new strategic partnership with SoftLayer (An IBM Company). Ironside is one of the world’s only managed services providers that exclusively specializes in the hosting and cloud deployment of managed IBM Business Analytics and Information Management solutions. Widely regarded as the foremost IBM Business Analytics and Information Management platform experts, Ironside brings decades of combined implementation and platform management experience and expertise that our consulting customers have enjoyed since 1999. Read more
Today’s big data challenges for both transactions and analytics are increasing demands on data systems. Traditional data warehouses sometimes struggle as they are often NOT designed to meet the demands of advanced analytics on big data. That’s where solutions like Netezza come in.
IBM PureData for Analytics (formerly Netezza) is a data warehouse appliance that has a purpose-built analytics engine and an integrated database, server, and storage. With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimization, no tuning, and minimal ongoing maintenance, the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest total cost of-ownership. Read more
Much has been written recently about the value of transforming data into useful information for decision making. It has become a strategic must-have for organizations to figure out how to use the structured historical data they already own, make sense of the ever-expanding amount of unstructured social media data out there, and implement the appropriate analytics platform to use these assets to their fullest extent through developing business intelligence maturity. Read more
Planning an information management infrastructure is a fun and exciting activity for everyone, whether they work with information systems or not. What? It isn’t? Then why are so many people building information management infrastructure solutions in Access and Excel? That’s not IM you say? Well in a way it is, though we can agree that it is neither sufficient nor sustainable for just about any organization. So why do it? Read more
Back in October when IBM Cognos 10 was first released, I initially touted Business Insight Advanced (BIA) as the single-most important enhancement over IBM Cognos 8. After a few months of hands-on usage, I am sticking to my initial assessment. Here are five key features that I’ve identified as having the greatest potential for a positive impact on practical business intelligence within most organizations. Read more
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.