Cashbuild improves visibility with QlikView

Making sense of change In the midst of a massive conversion to a new retail POS system and ERP suite in 2012, leading building materials retailer Cashbuild turned to QlikView to provide management information visibility. Andre van Onselen, operations director, says...

Big data comes to BI: can it cope?

Because of the way they are deployed, less than 10% of employees regularly use business intelligence (BI) tools. Forrester Research puts the fraction at between 5% and 9%. And of that user base, anecdotes abound of daily reports taking several days just to look...

Big data brings challenges, opportunities

“The business case for big data is virtually unlimited, presenting new challenges and opportunities for ICT players bold enough to take on the challenge of supporting big data use,” says Grant Vine, technical director at Cybervine. Big data, much like cloud computing,...

It’s about big answers, not big data

Analytics is the top technology priority for CIOs and CFOs, according to Gartner; Nucleus Research recently released a report showing that organisations get a 10 to one return on analytics investment; IDC has increased growth forecasts for the analytics market....

Big data, analytics key to business strategy

Big data and analytics are all the rage. But while these are important concepts for businesses of all sizes, they have no value if they are merely another addition to IT’s “to-do” list. Gerald Naidoo, CEO of specialist systems integrator Logikal Consulting, says that...

Big data and presidential campaigns

After President Obama was re-elected in 2012, it emerged that his campaign had successfully used big data analytics in ways no other political campaign had done before. The team of over 100 people started with the core data of the voters’ roll, modelled how they...