Public data is everywhere, and if you know where to look, you’d be surprised at the insights it can give you. In fact, when paired with the right tools, this freely available information can enrich and complement your internal data resources to reveal compelling patterns of behavior and trends that you can act on to drive growth at your organization. To showcase what public data can do in the hands of professional analysts, we’re kicking off the Ironside Public Data Powered article series. These publications will periodically take you behind the scenes to show you how our consultants think about and interact with public data using the skills and technologies at their disposal. In this inaugural article, we’ll explore what it takes to start understanding patterns and relationships within a combined public and internal data set through IBM Watson Analytics.
Today, our world is filled with data. It has quietly become part of our daily life, and we’ve changed our routines to accommodate it. Beyond the impact it’s had on us, data itself has dramatically changed over the past two decades due to continual advances in internet and storage technology. Almost everything we interact with now is digital: web browsers, smart phones, tablets, social media accounts, and much more. Read more
On April 14th, Ironside hosted a What to Expect for Your Cognos Environment webinar, where Ironside’s Technical Services Manager presented on how your Cognos environment should behave along with tips and tricks for making any necessary improvements. Read more
IBM SPSS Modeler 17 and Statistics 23 were officially released at the beginning of March 2015. There are several important changes in licensing structure and system infrastructure, as well as many innovative new functionality enhancements. This article will briefly introduce the enhancements added to Modeler 17 from a practical perspective. Something worth noting as you begin exploring this most recent round of upgrades is that Analytics Server will be heavily leveraged in a lot of these new features. Read more
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
On March 26th, Ironside hosted What’s New in Cognos 10.2.2 – Top Features You Need to Know About Webinar, where Ironside’s Senior Technical Instructor presented the audience through all the powerful enhancements included in Cognos 10.2.2. Read more
To give you an idea of the many customization possibilities that RAVE technology unlocks, we’re providing a free download of a custom visualization crafted by one of our senior consultants. It’s a comparative column chart that can show projections, actual values, and targets all in one place in a clean, easy-to-interpret format. Read more
ELT is a term heard increasingly in today’s analytic environments. Understanding what it means, and how you can make use of it, requires understanding the traditional nature of how data warehouses are loaded and how data movement tools work. That’s why we’ve pulled this article together: to break down the ETL vs. ELT divide and show you where the similarities and differences are. Read more
Ironside Recognized as 2015 IBM Beacon Award Finalist for Outstanding Information Management Solution
This year, Ironside received the high honor of being placed among the finalists for IBM’s prestigious Beacon Award in the category of Outstanding Information Management solution. The accolade displays IBM’s recognition of an unprecedented and groundbreaking project for one of Ironside’s top clients that included an end-to-end enterprise information management architecture that was entirely cloud-based. Additionally, and in partnership with IBM SoftLayer, Ironside envisioned and executed on a never-before-seen cloud implementation that allowed the client to leverage the unparalleled power of an IBM PureData for Analytics infrastructure without having to bring it onsite. PureData for Analytics, more commonly known in the industry as Netezza, is one of the most robust and sophisticated data warehouses currently on the market. Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s take a deeper look into how Ironside is making Netezza more easily available than ever before. Read more
On February 24th, Ironside hosted Select the Right Cognos 10.2.2 Tool for the Job: Real-Life Selection Process Leveraging Your use Case webinar, where Ironside’s Senior Consulant De Hsieh, presented an in-depth look into which of the many Cognos tools available are right for which jobs. During this webinar we reviewed some of the issues your organization are currently facing and present our thoughts about and proven practices for their delivery. Read more
Ironside helps companies translate business goals and challenges into technology solutions that enable insightful analysis, data-driven decision making and continued success. We help you structure, integrate and augment your data, while transforming your analytic environment and improving governance.