Golf, Beaches and Informix – Welcome to Florida!

By Sajan Kuttappa, Marketing Manager – Analytics Platform Services, IBM

IBM Informix has forged new frontiers with its ability to effectively manage large amounts of data from the Internet of Things. You can also seamlessly integrate non-standard data types, with a rich set of APIs including REST, that enhance development simplicity, flexibility and time to market. All of this without compromising on availability, scalability and security which make it the most powerful enterprise class database in the market today

While Informix has evolved over the years to stay in tune with rapid advances in technology, the annual IIUG conference has established itself as the premiere data and analytics conference and the best place to learn about the latest updates from the technology world. The best brains are selected to share their expertise during 3 days of educational sessions that will help the audience develop key skills for career advancement while also providing great networking opportunities with IBM executives, Informix development team and more.

In 2015 we celebrated 20 years of the IIUG and I am sure the emotional moments from the conference held at San Diego last year will be etched in the memories of all those who attended. The 2016 conference will be held from May 4^th – 8^th at the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, USA and the lineup of speakers and sessions looks very promising.

At the home of the PGA tour, you will be served an excellent platter of technical educational sessions that cover everything from the benefits of Hybrid databases, Spark analytics with Informix, Tools and technologies for the world of Internet-of-Things (IoT). You can further benefit from the optional tutorials on May 8^th around database administration, application development and tools on Sunday. Become IBM Informix Certified by taking the IBM Informix Professional Certification exams or almost any other IBM Information Management exam (the first exam is usually free at a savings of about $150).  

Visit www.iiug2016.org for more details and register yourself. Paid registration includes full access to IIUG 2016 from May 4 – 8 including continental breakfast and lunch each day, the Wednesday evening reception and admission to IIUG party on May 5 and 6. IIUG members who register online get $100.00 off registration fees

So get ready to tee off with the best minds in the technology world. Welcome to Florida!

Connected devices and new business engagement models for industries

By   Sajan Kuttappa,  Marketing Manager, Analytics Platform Services

Business strategy expert Michael Porter recently referred to it as the “Third wave of IT innovation”. Not a day passes without articles being published about the multi-billion dollar value that it will help create.

If you are still wondering what this is about…here’s one more hint –  While everyone seems to agree on the impact that this will create not many understand the true shape that this could take in the future.

We are talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) and the promise of an utopian future where connected devices are the norm. As experts will tell you, the IoT as it is popularly called, is not new-to-the-world. In fact it has been around in different forms for many years.

While a few industries like manufacturing are ahead of the curve with adoption of IoT, there are new use cases within other industries where the concept of devices talking to each other over the internet is helping with designing innovative products, tackling inefficiencies within supply chains, improving customer service and more. Businesses of all types – manufacturers, servicing organizations, public utilities, industrial, telecommunications, healthcare providers and more are adopting the use of sensor technology to lower operating costs and increase business value. This is driving the need for instant access to information for speed-of-thought insight and the ability to deliver new services in record time.

Join IBM and Intel for a special event at the IBM Briefing Center in San Jose on August 17th. This half-day event will feature real world solutions using the latest IoT, cloud and analytics technologies. Come and learn how leading edge solutions can be implemented now and take the opportunity to meet the IBM and Intel teams supporting IoT industry solutions.

You can register for the event here – https://ibm.biz/BdXAXK

Creating Real World Sensor-to-Business Value Internet of Things Applications

By Sajan Kuttappa
Marketing Manager, IBM

Consider the following scenarios:

• Analysis of data from shoppers’ mobile devices is delivering insights about which store location within a mall will guarantee a retailer the highest footfall
• Consumers are optimizing their energy consumption by better analyzing their power usage patterns over regular time intervals. Utility companies are using this data to build more responsive grids
• Public transport /shared transport is being revolutionized with a better understanding of how and when people travel

The aforementioned scenarios are not just a futuristic outlook on the potential benefits of connected devices – rather they are some of the existing applications of the insights gained from machines talking to each other. These are exciting times in the world of connected devices. Devices today are helping companies and consumers learn a lot more about their ecosystem and are helping create new services and evolve new business models.

Hildebrand’s Smart platform powered by IBM Informix

Hildebrand is one such company which is focused on helping develop solutions for the retail, energy and transport industries using their Smart Platform. They recently used their Smart platform to launch a retail “footfall” tracking solution that collects and analyzes 250 million data points per day to deliver insights to retailers about dwell time, frequency of return visits. Apart from this, Hildebrand solutions continue to play an important role in the domain of energy usage and transport systems.

To tackle the big data, Hildebrand deployed IBM Informix database, which has built-in ability to handle massive amounts of Time-stamped data easily while providing faster storage, retrieval and real-time analytics

Constructing the IoT solution

IBM and Hildebrand are hosting a special event in London on December 10, 2014 focused on creating real world sensor-to-business value Internet of Things applications. This half-day event will feature a real world solution using IBM Cloud TimeSeries technology with Hildebrand data collection and analytics solutions.

If you are interested in learning how real-world IoT solutions are built, you can attend this half-day event on Dec 10th starting at 09.30 AM at the IBM Executive Briefing Center, Southbank, London and take the opportunity to meet the IBM team supporting IoT Industry solutions in the UK.

You can book your place by registering for the event here http://www.hildebrand.co.uk/IoTLondon/

If you would like to stay updated, follow @IBM_Informix on Twitter for the latest Informix announcements, and updates!

When Your Database Can’t Cut It, Your Business Suffers

By Larry Heathcote
Program Director, IBM Data Management

 

Your database is critical to your business. Applications depend on it. Business users depend on it. And when your database is not working well, your business suffers.

IBM DB2 offers high performance support for both transactional processing and speed-of-thought analytics, providing the right foundation for today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

We’ve all heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out,” and this is so true in today’s big data world. But it’s not just about good data; it’s also about the infrastructure that captures and delivers data to business applications and provides timely and actionable insights to those who need to understand, to make decisions, to act, to move the business forward.

 

It’s one thing to pull together a sandbox to examine new sources of data and write sophisticated algorithms that draw out useful insights. But it’s another matter to roll this out into production where Line of Business users depend on good data, reliable applications and insightful analytics. This is truly where the rubber meets the road – the production environment…and your database better be up to it.

Lenny Liebmann, InformationWeek Contributing Editor, and I recorded a webinar recently titled “Is Your Database Really Ready for Big Data.” And Lenny posted a blog talking about the role of DataOps in the modern data infrastructure. I’d like to extend this one more step and talk about the importance of your database in production. The best way I can do that is through some examples.

 

1: Speed of Deployment

ERP systems are vital to many companies for effective inventory management and efficient operations. It is important to make sure that these systems are well tuned, efficient and highly available, and when a change is needed that it be done quickly. Friedrich ran the SAP environment for a manufacturing company, and he was asked to improve the performance of applications that were used for inventory management and supply chain ops. More specifically, he needed to replace their production database with one that improved application performance but kept storage growth to a minimum. Knowing that time is money, his mission was to deploy the solution quickly, which he did… 3 hours up and running in a production environment with more than 80 percent data compression and 50x performance improvement. The business impact – inventory levels were optimized, operating costs were reduced and the supply chain became far more efficient.

 

2: Performance

Rajesh’s team needed to improve performance of an online sales portal that gave his company’s reps the ability to run sales and ERP reports from their tablets and mobile phones out in the field. Queries were taking 4-5 minutes to execute, and this simply was not acceptable – btw, impatience is a virtue for a sales rep. Rajesh found that the existing database was the bottleneck, so he replaced it. With less than 20 hours of work, it was up and running in production with a 96.5 percent reduction in query times. Can you guess the impact this had? Yep, sales volumes increased significantly, Rajesh’s team became heroes and the execs were happy. And, since reps were more productive, they were also more satisfied and rep turnover was reduced.

 

3: Reliability, Availability and Scalability

In today’s 24x7x365 world, transaction system downtime is just not an option. An insurance company was having issues with performance, availability, reliability and scalability needed to support the company’s rapid growth of insurance applications. Replacing their database not only increased application availability from 80 to 95 percent, but they also saw a dramatic improvement in data processing times even after a 4x growth in the number of concurrent jobs … and, decreased their total cost of ownership by 50 percent. The company also saw customer satisfaction and stickiness improve.

These significant results happened because these clients upgraded their core database to IBM DB2. DB2 offers high performance support for both transactional processing and speed-of-thought analytics, providing the right foundation for today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

To learn more, watch our webinar.

Follow Larry on twtter at @larryheathcote

 

Join Larry and Lenny on a Tweet Chat on June 26 11 ET.  Join the conversation using #bigdatamgmt.  For the questions and more details see: http://bit.ly/Jun26TweetChat

Speed & Simplicity

 Larry Heathcote , Program Director, IBM Data Management

I’ve been thinking a lot about the database and data warehousing markets lately. Like “shower moment” thinking – you know when you’re really passionate about something, you think about it in the shower. Well, for me, yesterday I had a “highway moment.”

I was driving down one of the major roads in Raleigh, NC on my way to have dinner with my wife. And traffic started to get a little heavy, so everyone had to slow down, and slow down, and slow down some more. We didn’t stop, but we were moving painfully slow. We were all going somewhere, just not very fast. Frustration set in.

And at that moment, it hit me. I felt just like Joe. Joe is a data warehousing architect I met a few weeks back when I was out on a speaking trip (Joe is not his real name). Joe and his team have been working on a really important project for the past couple months, but they’ve run into some performance challenges that may jeopardize their delivery date. Every day they were making progress, very slow progress. And Joe was getting frustrated. Just like me sitting in slow traffic.

Joe’s company manufactures and sells products through a number of brick-and-mortar stores as well as online. A big percentage of their sales are to repeat customers. And recently, a couple of their products had some quality issues – which swamped their call centers for a few weeks. The merchandising managers now wants to find out if the quality issues in one of their product lines was having a ripple affect to other product areas. So they asked Joe to give them the data and the analytics they need to gain this insight. And they wanted answers, like now!

Joe and his team recently migrated one of the company’s core customer databases onto a larger server and bought more storage. Then they integrated call center logs from their support centers, but they found that they were not getting the query performance they had expected. They fixed a few problems and cut query times significantly, but when stress testing the system they could just not get the response times that the merchandising managers wanted.

And that’s when it hit me for a second time…Joe’s challenges are not unique. Increasing data volumes, upgrading infrastructures, mixing in new data types and doing new types of analytics – there are a lot of companies going through this right now to satisfy increasing demands from line of business managers.

What Joe needs is this – he needs speed and simplicity – a next-generation database for the big data era. One that can handle all data types, SQL and NoSQL, transactional and mixed analytics workloads, take advantage of modern technologies like in-memory columnar processing and other performance accelerating techniques. And one that is easy and fast to set up, deploy and manage; one that would take fewer resources to manage, so Joe and his team could focus on additional innovative projects to support his business managers.

What Joe needs – is IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration. View the infographic here to find out why.