Digital Twin – Topical use cases

Being left behind in an increasingly digital world is a scary thought.  Gartner predicts that this year alone, organisations with digital trustworthiness will have a substantial advantage (of up to 20% increased revenue in online channels) compared to their competitors.  In our previous article, Digital Twins – Why all the fuss, we introduced the concept […]

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Digital Twins – Why all the fuss?

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen What do Twins, NASA, Pokémon Go, the Internet of Things, Big Data and business value have in common? As our landscape changes to embrace digital integration, the physical and virtual worlds are moving closer together than ever before. As flagged by Gartner, digital twins are pegged to be a key strategic technology […]

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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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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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From Reactive to Proactive with IoT in Manufacturing

A solution that helps the after market service department of a manufacturer responds to machine issues proactively rather than reactively.

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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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From water cooler discussion to corporate Data Analytics in record time

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen For those who have been involved in conventional Business Intelligence projects, you will be all too familiar with the likely contiguous chain of events and the likely outcome. It typically goes something like this: The idea is incubated by someone (very often this would be within ICT), a business case for a […]

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Strategic Segmentation

Preface Market segmentation is a common practice in marketing and sales in order to better understand – and therefore be better able to target – customers. This same principle, though, can be applied to any business problem where the division of a diverse population into sub-populations based on similarities (or differences) would be advantageous. Fortunately, […]

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Connecting to Big Data Clusters from Excel

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Connecting to big data clusters from Excel is now relatively simple. But those who have tried would have noticed multiple ways to achieve what seems to be the same thing. This article aims to clear these muddy waters a bit. I am using Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus (Excel 2013) updated to […]

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Power BI and Microsoft Azure – what’s all the fuss about?

Author: Etienne Oosthuysen This blog provides a journey starting with Excel and its promotion to BI, it moves on to Power BI version 2 and concludes with a much larger Azure analytical story. Let’s start this journey with some topical statistics. US$97bn the projected annual dollar spend on BI services by 2016. Good 19% the […]

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