Chatbots – how the Azure bot framework is changing the AI game

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen What are Chatbots? Communication underpins intelligence. And language underpins communication. But language is complex and must be understood through the prism of intent and understanding. For example: Take the term, “thong” – in Australian slang this means flip-flops, a meaning lost on someone not familiar with Australian slang, as it means underwear […]

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Power BI Report Server – A Quick Walk Through

Just about any implementation of a reporting environment within an organisation will have different styles of reports for different purposes. These reports may be operational\paginated, self-service using Excel, and\or highly interactive and user-friendly Power BI reports. The central question then beckons, how do all our users access these reports within one location which is easily […]

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Game changing – see how Power BI models become Azure Analysis Services models

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Businesses are increasingly embracing an empowered regime when it comes to data analytics and business intelligence. Subject matter experts inside business units are increasingly at the forefront of the creation of data models on which reports and dashboards rely. Various technologies (such as Tableau, Qlik and Power BI), now facilitate user-access to […]

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We test drive Azure Time Series Insights

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen In this video, we take Azure Time Series Insights for a test drive. It is the new “fully managed analytics, storage, and visualization service that makes it simple to explore and analyse billions of IoT events simultaneously”. We also importantly look at the differences between Power BI’s real-time visualisation capabilities and Azure […]

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We test drive Azure Analysis Services – the good, and the not so good.

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Microsoft’s announcement of the release of Azure Analysis Services for SSAS Tabular solutions as a PaaS solution has come at just the right time. In the modern world of Advanced Analytics, Semantic Models rather than data warehouses will increasingly play the core role in corporate data landscapes – they are places where […]

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Artificial Intelligence in Advanced Analytics Platforms

Artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses various technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, cognition, and machine reasoning. Usually, AI is defined as a biological system which is designed for computers to give them the human-like ability of hearing, seeing, thinking and then reasoning. One of the newest technology applications in businesses, Computer Vision, […]

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Is the Data Warehouse Dead?

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen I am increasingly asked by customers – Is the Data Warehouse dead? In technology terms, 30 years is a long time. This is how old the Data Warehouse is – that makes the Data Warehouse an old timer. Can we consider it a mature yet productive worker, or is it a worker […]

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Cognitive Intelligence meets Advanced Analytics

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Acquiring knowledge of anonymous customers through Cognitive Intelligence is the next generation customer based Business Intelligence. Human behavior and characteristics such as speech, demographics, and emotion can now be expressed digitally and blended that with Advanced Analytics.  Exposé apply this across a number of different use cases as shown in the video. […]

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Test drive AWS QuickSight

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen As part of our commitment to deliver the best possible business outcome for our Advanced Analytics customers, we ensure that we remain across the technologies that enable us to deliver such outcomes. This test drive of AWS’ QuickSight BI tool and its underlying parallel processing engine (SPICE) is part of that commitment to […]

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A story is worth a thousand visuals

Any report can contain information. It’s relatively easy to just place random visualisations together to display information from a multitude of data sources. But without context or structure does this add any value or provide a better experience for the report reader?

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Colouring with numbers – Can data present a better picture?

With the rise of self-service reporting, is just presenting the data enough? Or is how information is presented just as impactful as to what is being presented?

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The battle of the AMLs – Amazon Machine Learning Vs Azure Machine Learning

As machine learning has become more accessible to businesses and the number of products currently available has risen in the market, the question is regularly asked of us as leaders in data and analytics to recommend, or at least provide insight, into some of those products.  Machine learning has become more accessible and there are […]

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