Let's get caught up with analytics news...

I've got blogs brewing on machine learning, another viewpoint on Hadoop, and the cloud...but for now here's a few noteworthy stories from the last couple of weeks:

• Teradata throws Aster into the Hadoop mix for IoT.  Teradata have always been more consumer oriented, very much a retail data warehouse vendor historically.  But, all things must change - or at least, they do if you want to survive...So, back in 2011 Teradata acquired Aster Data to freshen up its analytics offerings, particularly around unstructured data and commodity hardware.  And now it's pointing that at IoT - via Hadoop.  No reason I can think of off the top of my head (and it's late on Friday, so it is off the top of my head...) why that same framework might also be applied in some Industrial IoT scenarios.  More here for the terminally curious.


• This one's very much in the consumer arena too, EVRYTHNG's cloud-based service for pulling together consumer product data for analytics.  Again, not directly Industrial Internet of Things, but I always reckon a bit of crossover and lateral thinking is never a bad thing...


• Oh-oh, two stories down and nothing explicit on the cloud...best put that right.  Esteban Kolsky wrote a lengthy three part treatise on exactly what the cloud is.  I found it pretty interesting, particularly the assertion that cloud computing is an architecture, not a technology - and there are very few true cloud applications yet for that reason.  For those of a tl;dr persuasion, you might prefer to cast your eye over the shorter piece here.


• Following on from that,  R "Ray" Wang has an interesting piece on the perils of cloud lock-in.  Cloud providers are apparently striving for the dreaded lock-in.  And why wouldn't they...Hardware and software vendors have tried to lock-in their customers since the abacus basically, because - well, because it's a license to print money and who wouldn't want that...?


• Finally, news from the employer that taught me that fast growth enterprise software sales is akin to bare knuckle fighting.  Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud is perhaps not the catchiest of names, but it does tell you what's in the box.  Like most enterprise software vendors - or established BI vendors - Oracle had to come out with a visual data discovery solution to fight off Tableau.  You can get a free 30 day trial, which is nice.  Beyond that though, the price is a hefty $250 per month per named user.  Yeah, I was hoping there would be a decimal point in there somewhere too, but nope....(Note, this article claims $150 a user, but I took my numbers from the horses mouth).  If there's something special in there to speed your path to insight using Oracle applications data, that's not at all obvious.  But, it might justify a higher price point if it did.  With a 10 user minimum also part of the deal, Oracle's not pursuing a land-and-expand strategy like every other data visualization vendor that I can think of.  It's priced as a premium product.  If you have no particular affinity for Oracle, and/or you just want to dip a toe in the water of data visualization, there are more affordable options.  If you can't find them, ask me.