Infostack Pty Ltd

16 March 2014 is the 2014 Sydney St Patrick’s Day Parade and Family Day. It promises to be a lot of fun.

Details available at:
http://www.stpatricksday.org.au/st-patricks-day-parade/

2014 Parade and Family Day - Welcome to the Sydney St Patrick's Day website The St Patrick's Day Parade Org Inc is a not for profit organisation managed by a group of professional volunteers. The day is made possible thanks to the efforts of the volunteer committee and the team of individuals who give up their time before, during and after the event. This year's committee b...

Happy Australia day!

Happy new year!

Why the Small and Medium Business (SMB) should care about the cloud.

Technology gives any business a competitive advantage, but the Small and Medium Business (SMB) can't always afford the technology that the bigger enterprises can.

"Technology is a huge driver of competitive advantage, and historically, technology that larger companies used was not available to smaller companies, who typically have 50 employees or less."

Cloud technologies level the playing field for the SMB, it allows the SMB to leverage the same technology advantage than the bigger enterprises without the huge cost overhead.

“Now, for the first time, there is technology available that doesn’t require hardware or technical expertise and gives small companies the same technology as a big company. That gets rid of the technology advantage, and that’s a huge change.”

Of the four types of cloud solutions the public cloud gives the biggest value to the small and medium business and the cloud technologies also solve many of the barriers the SMB experience.

"Levin said the public cloud is a “game changer” for small businesses because it gives them access to enterprise-level applications. "

"CDW’s market research shows that security, performance and integration are the barriers most often cited by small businesses."

The public cloud can give your business the benefits of the technology used by bigger enterprises at a lower cost while solving your security, performance and integration problems. The public cloud also offers a fit for purpose solution to your business, where you only pay for the features you want.

Full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/06/amex-what-is-the-cloud-and-why_n_3964066.html

What Is The Cloud? (And Why Small Businesses Need To Care) Cloud computing has come a long way to become a mainstream technology tool for business. Earlier this year, Parallels, a software company that enables companies like GoDaddy.com and Sprint to offer cloud services to small and medium businesses (SMB), reported that the cloud services industry grew to...

Loading more and more data into a big data store doesn't really solve business problems, no matter the hype, just a small quote from this study sums it it up:

"In the real world, though, companies aren’t tumbling over each other in a rush to start Big Data initiatives. In a recent online poll of IT World Canada readers, half said their companies weren’t buying into the Big Data hype. Interestingly, though, a quarter said they were on the fence until they saw a relevant business case."

Unlocking business value directly translate into solving real world business cases. Adding some intelligence to the Big Data on hand makes all the difference:

"The old Ticket master system was event-centric; it could identify who went to an event, but not what other events a ticketholder had attended. The new database was customer-centric, allowing staff to track attendance histories of individual ticketholders."

"The eye-opener for Nowicki was that the ticketing group was sometimes throwing too much promotion at weaker games, cannibalizing traffic from stronger performing games."

A small example how switching perspective from one dimension to another unlocks more business value, without adding more and more data.

http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/putting-analytics-to-work/86436

Putting analytics to work Big Data has been the buzzword for the last couple of years. The potential insight that can be gained from huge unstructured