It is really remarkable how many companies today view data analytics as the cornerstone of their businesses.aCerno is an advertising network that uses powerful analytics to predict which advertisements to deliver to which person at what time. Their analytics are performed on completely anonymous consumer shopping data of 140M users obtained from an association of 450+ product manufacturers and multi-channel retailers. There is a strong appetite at aCerno to perform analytics that they have not done before because each 1% uplift in the click-through rates is a significant revenue stream for them and their customers.

Aggregate Knowledge powers a discovery network (The Pique Discoveryâ„¢ Network) that delivers recommendations of products and content based on what was previously purchased and viewed by an individual using the collective behavior of the crowds that had behaved similarly in the past. Again, each 1% increase of engagement is a significant revenue stream for them and their customers.

ShareThis provides a sharing network via a widget that makes it simple for people to share things they find online with their friends. In a short period of time since their launch, ShareThis has reached over 150M unique monthly users. The amazing insight is that ShareThis knows which content users actually engage with, and want to tell their friends about! And in its sheer genius, ShareThis gives away its service to publishers and consumers free; relying on delivering targeted advertising for its revenue: by delivering relevant ad messages while knowing the characteristics of that thing being shared. Again, the better their analytics, the better their revenue.

Which brings me to my point: data analytics is a direct contributor of revenue gains in these companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are pleased to welcome Pentaho as a partner to Aster Data Systems. What this means is that our customers can now use Pentaho open-source BI products for reporting and analysis on top of Aster nCluster.

We have been working with Pentaho for some time on testing the integration between their BI products and our analytic database. We’ve been impressed with Pentaho’s technical team and the capabilities of the product they’ve built together with the open source community. Pentaho recently announced a new iPhone application which is darn cool!

I guess, by induction, Aster results can be seen on the iPhone too.

I’ve remarked in an earlier post that the usage of data is changing and new applications are on the horizon. Over the past few years, we’ve observed or invented quite a few interesting design patterns for business processes that use data.

There are no books or tutorials for these new applications, and they are certainly not being taught in the classrooms of today. So I figured I’d share some of these design patterns on our blog.

Let me start with a design pattern that we internally call “The Automated Feedback Loop”. I didn’t invent it but I’ve seen it being applied successfully at search engines during my research days at Stanford University. I certainly think there is a lot of power that remains to be leveraged from this design principle in other verticals and applications.

Read the rest of this entry »