Goldsmiths at the heart of data-driven business
Niral Patel, MD of Oracle South Africa, discusses the role people, data and machines must play in forming the data-driven businesses of tomorrow. Data, as a raw material with a recognised value, is often likened to gold. Just as prospectors once crossed continents in...
Speed and agility key to SME success
Small business growth is being hindered by a lack of access to finance as entrepreneurs struggle with antiquated bank assessments that rely too heavily on outdated manual processes and criteria, writes Trevor Gosling, CEO of Lulalend. In the 2016 National Small...
Crossroads Foundation picks Qlik
Qlik has partnered with Crossroads Foundation, a Hong Kong-based charity, to transform the way it manages donations through improved management and visualisation of data. One of the most impressive results of the deployment is a new smartphone app that enables anyone...
Small data crucial for the IoT ecosystem
The volume of data that the billions of things lying at the edge of the Internet of Things (IoT) will generate needs a comprehensive strategy for protocol mediation, processing, analysing, storing, securing, applying, and even sharing data to deliver value-creating...
Will artificial intelligence replace our jobs?
Young South Africans are concerned about the impact emerging technology will have on job stability. F5 Networks senior systems engineer Martin Walshaw explores the challenges and opportunities ahead. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning...
Can the data lake replace the data warehouse?
Analytics has become essential to drive the intelligent businesses. However, with the addition of this multitude of unstructured data - think email, videos, photos, audio files, presentations, webpages - businesses have had to find a new way to pool, access and...
Data analytics and the changing face of industries
The days of being transported in self-driving cars and having our phones suggest what we ought to eat for lunch are upon us: this is the age of big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Never before have industries had the power to use information to...
Technology adds to human judgement for investment
Coined in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, the buzzword "fake news" continues to be a source of frustration amongst politicians, media houses and big corporates alike. In the realm of investing, however, whether information is based on fact or fiction is...
AI set to revolutionise banking
Artificial Intelligence gets a bad rap in pop culture. Movies like Terminator (with its rebellious Skynet) and 2001 (with its murderous HAL 9000) portray a future where the robots get smart, and conclude that it is in their interests to try and destroy mankind. But...
AI drive the rise of new skills
The fear that artificial intelligence will threaten the jobs of human workers is quickly being dispelled. "It is natural that with change comes fear, however fear also hinders development moving forward. Change should therefore be viewed as an opportunity and nowhere...
The rise of AI gives organisations competitive edge
While big data has been a popular buzzword among industry sectors over the past few years, adequately collecting and analysing customer information to gain key insights through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not something all organisations have managed to...
Managing the value of data
The value of data is something that has progressed from a technology discussion into a business imperative. No organisation can survive in the always-on environment without having access to data. Fortunately, better business resilience is to be had by leveraging the...