Open Source Analytics

I would, in due course, spend some time on the R Environment (available as part of DecisionStudio Professional, and separately downloadable from http://r-project.org). R provides an excellent alternative to commercial products for modeling, statistical analysis, and graphics. Originally designed by AT&T Bell Labs, the R environment is fast becoming the standard for cutting edge number crunching.
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On Friday we released DecisionStudio Professional – a comprehensive and free desktop BI Platform that gives you all the tools needed for analytics under a single package licensed under GNU Public License (GPL).

DecisionStudio Professional (DSP) is an advanced graphical data mining, reporting, modeling, and analysis environment built on top of the best-of-breed open source projects. Some of these include:
— Optimized MySQL database as data warehouse platform
— SQL Workbench (MySQL Query Browser and DBDesigner) for Data Analysts
— R environment for statistical analysis and modeling
— iReport Reporting GUI and JasperReport reporting library
— Python with Boa Constructor IDE for application and GUI development

DecisionStudio Professional is the only end-to-end open source analytics platform that provides comprehensive capabilities to each role. Data Analysts get to store, process, and publish data on a standard MySQL platform; Reporting Analysts would like iReport and the integration with Office tools; and Modelers would love the excellent R Environment. It also includes Python along with a drag-n-drop GUI building environment for analytics Application Developers.

You can find out more about DecisionStudio Professional at decisionstudio.com, and can download your copy at Sourceforge.net. Click here to download the product brochure (PDF).

Go ahead, it’s completely free and will always stay so.

Analytics and Business Intelligence is really about the conversion of raw data into optimal and actionable decisions to create tangible business value. Otherwise, what’s the point?
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In the last post (OLAP Reporting on Open Source Software – I) we spoke about Mondrian, an open-source OLAP server.

In this post we would be setting up OLAP reporting for a hypothetical retailer called FoodMart that sells various grocery products in a chain of stores across US, Canada, and Mexico.
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OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) reporting systems provide what is commonly known as “slice-and-dice” functionality to non-technical end users. Users are able to see ad-hoc reports and charts to answer ad-hoc questions they may want answered. Another commonly used name is “drill-down reporting” on “OLAP cubes”. In essence this is similar to the Excel based Pivot reports, only that OLAP systems can do the same thing on massive amounts of data.

The OLAP Reporting revolves around two simple concepts: Dimensions, and Measures.
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Happy New Year, and back to work.

The Data Warehouse is the foundation of any analytics initiative. You take data from various data sources in the organization, clean and pre-process it to fit business needs, and then load it into the data warehouse for everyone to use. This process is called ETL which stands for ‘Extract, transform, and load’.
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One month, 3 hours, and 10 minutes since I last posted.

Down. But not out.

Tomorrow IS another day. Catch you then.

Merry Christmas folks. Hope you have been having a great time.

Prompted by a reader comment, this post is about that elusive difference between Analytics and regular IT. Or is there really a difference?
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Probably because they are creaming the market anyway, consultants from the bigshot analytics and BI companies are a royal pain to work with.

What we want from a million-dollar implementation project is the end result that delivers tangible value. And as that smilling pre-sales guy convinces us to sign that million-dollar contract, this is what we are thinking with a nagging gut feel that something might be amiss:

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Technology today is a weird scene.

Even though IT is usually one of the most important departments (strategically) in an organization, the transparency and accountability is sorely lacking. Have you ever wondered why IT departments are still run as a Cost Center in a world where far more intangible things are easily priced? It’s definitely not because you cannot price IT services. Just that life would become a little tougher for the pseudo-technologists if accountability was brought into IT. I still remember the stares I got when I naively suggested a few years back that we could increase productivity by considering our department (IT) as a Profit Center through notional pricing of services for internal customers. That would have exposed the con, and the idea was immediately killed.

And it is painfully mind-numbing to operate in such a group. And yet, it is the fundamental responsibility of every technologist to comprehend the important function he/she plays and to know what it takes to do his/her job well.

This is something that has bothered me for years now. Right until I came across this blog post just two days back that was putting down in words the same thing many a technologist have always believed in…

The only point of IT is to improve physical operations by providing efficiencies and reducing logical operations by providing automation…
The best business solution is not always the best technology solution. The burden is on you, the technologist, to make the best system the business will use.

I find myself getting strangely addicted to this new-born blog (just 10 days old) because of the absolute clarity of thought, and the raw manner in which it is delivered.

I shall not attempt to explain the post for fear of diluting it. To understand and appreciate for yourself the manifesto that a technologist should live and operate by, please go ahead and read
Things Everyone in IT Should Know…or, The Technologist Manifesto

I’ll be happy if it strikes a chord and rings a bell. And it might be a good idea to drop a comment for dratz (the blogger) if you find yourself nodding your head in agreement.