Loraine Lawson

Strategic Integration: 10 Business-Building Tips Imagine: A patient checks into a hospital ER. The patient is cleared and ready to go home, but first given follow-up care instructions, along with a prescription. For whatever reason — time, the patient feels too bad, or the patient is my medication-averse father — the prescription doesn’t get filled. […]

Organizations are starting to really mess up with master data management, according to a recent blog post by Gartner MDM expert Andrew White. MDM was never supposed to be used in the ways end users are starting to deploy it, he adamantly warns: There are a growing number of end user organizations that are trying […]

Eight Ways to Put Hadoop to Work in Any IT Department Despite the press Hadoop’s received in the past year, there’s still a lot of confusion about what it is and what it does, according to a recent TDWI report. Last fall, TDWI ran an email survey about the Hadoop ecosystem, and of the 263 […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed Integration continues to frustrate organizations trying to use SaaS applications. TechTarget reports that application integration showed up as a top cloud problem in two surveys it recently conducted. You may recall earlier this year a KPGM survey that found 31 percent said integrating cloud services with their on-premise […]

Actian Corporation announced Thursday it has finalized its acquisition of data integration vendor Pervasive Software. Pervasive Software has consistently ranked as a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools and a strong contender in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise ETL. Actian is best known for the Ingres Database, an open-source SQL relational […]

Sorting Through What’s Really Going on in the Hadoop Stack One of the ongoing and largely pointless debates about Big Data is what, exactly, the term means. I call it pointless, because, let’s face it — vendors aren’t going to stop using the term just because some analyst or journalist says it doesn’t meet the […]

This is the year the Internet of Things takes off, according to some. If that’s true, the challenge won’t be coming up with ideas about how to use connected “things,” but rather, how to make it successful. This is not a small question. Cisco’s analysis found that there is as much as a $14.4 trillion […]

What if you could save, say, $29,000 on each integration point your organization deployed? In only 3-4 integration points, you’d save one, full-time equivalency IT job, right? If you’ve never evaluated application integration costs before, there’s a good chance you’re overspending on it. I’ve seen a lot of figures over the year about how much […]

Making Sense of Big Data in the Real Business World Executives understand the need for better quality, at least, intuitively, says Ted Friedman (@ted_friedman), vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner’s Information Management team. It’s the math that trips them up. During a Gartner webinar on improving data quality, Friedman said the most asked question […]

Top Five Questions to Answer Before Starting on Big Data An Open Letter to Congress: Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a technology journalist who specializes in data issues. In my 10-plus years of covering technology, I’ve written about security, data, cutting-edge tech and mobile devices — like your phone. Occasionally, there’s a major […]

Eight Ways to Put Hadoop to Work in Any IT Department We’re leaving behind the early days of Big Data, when you had to build your own Hadoop cluster and then figure out what to do with it. From Big Data as a service to business analytics tools built on in-memory platforms, vendors are finding […]

Questions to Ask Before Implementing a Business Intelligence/Analytics System Let’s face it: The bring-your-own-device discussion is over, and the smartphones and tablets have won. It’s time to move on to the real challenge: How do you support using mobile devices, particularly when it comes to managing data? “A new era of development is on the […]