Year: 2016

Budget Strategies for Maximizing Big Data – Idexcel Big Data Roundup

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1. Budget Strategies for Maximizing Big Data

Big data doesn’t necessarily come with a big pricetag. Here, an expert offers his tips for using big data on a small budget.

Got an operational problem?

Big Data will solve it! Marketing ills? Ask Big Data! Those two words have become a catchall — but data-crunching services tend to chase after enterprise-level businesses, making them out of reach for most small businesses. (Google Analytics Premium, for example, starts at $150,000 a year.) Don’t worry: Martineau says that with a strategic approach to Big Data, anyone can afford it. Continue reading…

2. Hadoop Overview: A Big Data Toolkit

Big Data isn’t new. Forbes traces the origins back to the “information explosion” concept first identified in 1941. The challenge has been to develop practical methods for dealing with the 3Vs: Volume, Variety, and Velocity. Without tools to support and simplify the manipulation and analysis of large data sets, the ability to use that data to generate knowledge was limited. The current interest and growth in Big Data, Data Science, and Analytics is largely because the tools for working with Big Data have finally arrived. Hadoop is an important piece of any enterprise’s Big Data plan. Continue reading…

3. Mendix Low-Code Mobile Dev Platform Connects IoT, Big Data and Machine Learning

Mendix today announced a new version of its low-code mobile development platform, designed to help developers build “Smart Apps” with connectors to accommodate emerging trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and machine learning (ML). Continue reading…

4. Marketing Technology Vendors Offer Big Success with Big Data

As you’re probably already aware, the marketing technology vendor landscape is amazingly vast. Scott Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com, shares that in 2016 there are at least 3,874 vendors hawking their wares in the marketing technology space. And every single one of them uses data.
To that end, following are four examples of marketing technology vendors using big data effectively: Continue reading…

5. Role of Risk Audits: How the Cloud & Big Data have Changed Them

The role of auditors has been changing rapidly over the past decade. Big data is allowing them to make higher quality decisions. However, their job is also becoming more complicated, so future financial auditors will need a strong background in IT.

7 Behaviors of Successful People

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Why just admire successful people when you could be successful yourself? Success isn’t all about luck. It’s about focus, determination, optimism and hard work. Changing your mindset and behaviors can be tricky at first, but the payoff — quite literally — is worth the extra effort. Below are seven specific behaviors that successful people practice in their daily lives. Continue reading…

Hiring the Right Talent

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In the volatile market situations, it is quite difficult to predict what attributes and qualifications of the candidate would be required six months or one year down the line. In such volatile work scenarios, there is constant fragmenting, reorganizing and reconceptualization of the market. This makes hiring the right candidate for any given requirement quite challenging as companies need to ensure that the candidate has right attributes to adapt to the constant change within and outside the organisation. The work environment requires candidates to be rapid, flexible, and quick learners. The job demands them to be adaptable, and have broad knowledge in different business fields.

To gauge the strengths and competitiveness of the candidate and to ensure the right fit, it is essential to ask the right questions. Some of the aspects on which the candidate can be evaluated are:

1. Adaptability– In most organisational systems, change is the only constant. Candidate should be able to give examples of the evaluation, shift and growth in his/her previous workplace, and how new roles were handled.

2. Team Player– Today’s competitive business world requires individuals to be cooperative and they must possess the skills that can help groups thrive and become more productive. The candidate must be creative and self-directed, who can think of competitive gains of the entire team and organisation.

3. Comprehending Disparate Information– Every work environment has overabundance of data and information which can be quite overwhelming. The candidate should be able to see important patterns and trends in the information, proactively see the market dynamics, and take decisions accordingly.

4. People and Relationship Management– Positive and productive energy for the initiatives and projects is essential for the success of any company. The candidate should be able to create a spirited workplace with affirming and attentive interactions with others.

5. Owning the Mistakes-Making mistakes is essential for adaptive learning. Learners make quite a few mistakes, and are able to learn important lessons. The candidate should be able to describe his/her failures, and the lessons learnt from these mistakes. If the candidate is not able to describe any failure, consider it a warning sign. Also, if the person keeps blaming external factors for their failures or problems, it might be a good idea to not pursue.

6. Constant Learning-Candidates should be able to display the eagerness to learn, and should also be able to pursue learning on their own. New concepts, ideas, and information should get them excited, not make them feel nervous or intimated.

7. Social Media Presence– Professional information can easily be seen on the social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc., and it is an essential key to find out more about the candidate as an individual and also as an employee. Social behaviour of a person might give a hint how he or she will fit in the company’s culture. If the candidate has anything to hide, they will not disclose much information, which can be a warning sign.

8. Soft Skills– It is important to gauge the social skills during interview. Skills can be acquired, but not the personality. The candidate should be able to elaborate the answers if required, and should be able to maintain the eye contact. Soft skills such as emotional intelligence, though process, interpersonal skills and communication skills are important, as they matter.

9. Questions Matter– Once the interview is over, the candidate should be able to comprehend the information gathered during the process of interview, and be in the position to synthesize and ask thoughtful questions about the core business. The depth of understanding about the business can help companies evaluate the candidate’s thought process, and if they will be able to diagnose market situations and respond to it responsibly.

The candidate should also be able to answer questions about business and industry, and what aspect of the core business interests them. This will show their level of interest in the company, and if they have done enough homework to justify their willingness. They should be able to understand and connect with the business, as well as the role they are expected to fill. The questions candidate ask can give the insight what is important for them.

No candidate exactly fits the bill or is perfectly qualified for the job. There is going to be leaning in any job. Although gut feeling helps, asking the right questions is also quite critical. The person should not only be right fit for the company, but also right fit for the job. To deal with the challenges of hiring the right candidates, organisations often engage with the staffing agencies as they have experience, reach and means to hire the most suitable candidates for any given job. Idexcel is a premier provider of IT staffing solutions to Fortune 500 customers. Whether it is providing just a few resources or staffing entire project teams involving hundreds of resources, Idexcel’s IT staffing solutions helps clients with the right talent, skills and competencies when they need them. We provide clients exceptional IT talent to meet their demanding technology initiatives at both local and national levels. Idexcel exceeds client expectations through highly effective processes for recruiting, screening, testing, and talent engagement.

Top 10 Must-Read Articles on Internet of Things – IoT 2016

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1. What are the five main markets for IoT?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is accelerating at an impressive speed, forecasters predict 25 billion devices will be online by 2020, creating over $300 billion in opportunities for companies involved1.

Even with this considerable growth coming in the next five years, most enterprise folks still don’t understand or aren’t invested in the IoT revolution. Management consulting firm Bain & Company believe that’s due to misrepresentation on the definition of IoT. [Continue reading..]

2. What’s trending in the IoT space

Our team has been active as investors in the Internet of Things and hardware space over the past two years. We have read pitches from hundreds of companies, met with dozens, read hundreds of research reports and spoken with various experts. We have invested in six IoT/hardware companies from our global seed fund and seven from our startup accelerator.

With this accumulated knowledge, we decided to create an easy to read overview for others to get up to speed on this trending space of IoT. Here is our full report; the following is a summary of what we learned. [Continue reading..]

3. Here’s how the Internet of Things will explode by 2020

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been labeled as “the next Industrial Revolution” because of the way it will change the way people live, work, entertain, and travel, as well as how governments and businesses interact with the world.

In fact, the revolution is already starting.

That brand new car that comes preloaded with a bunch of apps? Internet of Things. Those smart home devices that let you control the thermostat and play music with a few words? Internet of Things. That fitness tracker on your wrist that lets you tell your friends and family how your exercise is going? You get the point.

But this is just the beginning. [Continue reading..]

4. Eight Data And Analytics Capabilities You’ll Need For The IoT

There is widespread agreement that the Internet of Things will be a transformative factor in the business use of information. The prospect of billions of connected devices promises to transform home activities, transportation, industrial operations, and many other aspects of our lives.

The bad news about the IoT is that we have a lot of work to do before we are ready for it. We’ve got to up our games considerably with regard to data management and analytics if we’re going to capture, store, access and analyze all the IoT data that will be flowing around the Internet. The good news (in addition to its potential) is that most organizations have a few years to get better at these capabilities before the real onslaught hits. The sensor devices, IoT data standards, and data management platforms are still in their relatively early stages, and no customer, business partner, or CEO could reasonably expect that you could tame all that IoT data today. [Continue reading..]

5. How does the IoT Evolve? In Fits and Starts

It has been quite a week for IoT in the news. The shutting down of Revolv by Nest became a major news item, covered by everyone from Fortune, CNET, Computerworld, NBC, and Yahoo just to name a few.

As usual, Stacy Higginbotham did a nice job in writing about what could have been done instead to make this all easier.

As background – Revolv was a small start-up in Boulder, Colorado. I know a lot about the team there, and like them a lot, so I admit to some bias up front. They built a smart home hub with seven radios to speak to 10 of the most popular smart home protocols. [Continue reading..]

6. What’s the Connection Between IoT and DevOps?

DevOps is the automation of Agile, using tools and processes that remove the traditional latency from application development. DevOps transformations are systemic to both enterprises and ISVs that I work with these days. Everyone now knows that it’s critical to make the best use of cloud computing, big data, and, now, the Internet of Things (IoT). [Continue reading..]

7. Will IoT Lock Down Your House Or Open The Door To Hackers?

Imagine a time when the transfer of data is fast and seamless, or a world where you control your devices without moving a finger. IoT, or the Internet of Things, looks to push that envelope of convenience and efficiency. IoT devices are becoming increasingly popular among homeowners seeking to make their homes automated and their day-to-day tasks easier. [Continue reading..]

8. New Business Drives Hitachi’s Internet of Things Strategy

We can now count Hitachi among the list of companies that has formed a division to specifically target the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a move that many automation suppliers are finding necessary as they try to better manage the technologies and expertise needed to capture this important market. [Continue reading..]

9. How Internet of Things Customer Data Will Forever Change Marketers’ Jobs

When a mobile app asks you to share personal data with a company, what do you do?
It probably depends on what you expect to get in return. That’s the new data economy consumers and brands are dealing with today: Companies want good user data, and users want good products and experiences. [Continue reading..]

10. How Silicon Valley is botching IoT

The “Internet of things” has been a Silicon Valley buzzword for the last few years, so it’s ironic that we seem to read almost as much tech news coverage about Internet of things hacking. In recent months, for example, VentureBeat has reported that the FBI is warning car makers and owners about vehicle hacking risks, and that IoT devices may be exploited as Trojan horses. And just a few days ago, we heard about a glitch at smart doorbell company Ring that exposed videos of users’ homes to other users. [Continue reading..]

The Many Benefits From A Talent Pipeline – Idexcel Recruiting & Hiring Roundup

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1. The Many Benefits From A Talent Pipeline – And How It Improves Quality Of Hire

If you’re looking for a powerful strategic recruiting approach that has powerful long-term impacts, you really only have two choices: employer branding, and a “recruiting talent pipeline.” While almost every major corporation is investing heavily in building their employer brand, it’s quite rare for one to actually have a high-performing external recruiting talent pipeline. A recruiting talent pipeline approach is known by a variety of names, including a “recruiting prospect inventory,” a “recruiting pool,” or a recruiting network. It is designed to give you a continuous supply of high-quality and interested external recruiting prospects to choose from. It is strategic because it has a long-term talent-supply focus, which means that critical jobs can be filled faster and with higher quality and more interested prospects. [Continue reading…]

2. Why “Employee Engagement” Is The Successories Poster of HR

Employee engagement is one of those perpetual trending topics in HR and recruiting, probably because for years now, pundits and practitioners alike still haven’t figured out how to confront what seems to be a fairly endemic case of malaise and apathy perpetually plaguing our workforce.

I’m not sure why it is that talent leaders and recruiting pros can’t to have a near obsessive fixation on what’s inherently an amorphous and highly ambiguous concept, but I think the primary driver of our engagement fetish is that it seems to be a convenient, categorical catch-all that’s more or less seen as the whipping boy for all of the manifold problems plaguing the HR and recruiting profession today. [Continue reading…]

3. How to Bring Out Talent in Your Team

If you manage other people, the first thing you need to understand is that your success depends on their success. The more you empower your employees, the more they will grow and thrive. Here’s how to get started…

Give employees generous boundaries. Contrary to conventional wisdom, boundaries don’t restrict team members; they empower them. Define the boundaries within which an employee can make his or her own decisions. In doing so, you give them freedom to act. [Continue reading…]

4. 10 Ways Employee Surveys Help Attract and Retain Talent

The war for talent rages on. A 2015 ICIMS study found that 86 percent of the 107 HR professionals surveyed expect hiring to increase or stay the same. However, employers are looking for less conventional means of connecting with job seekers.

Social recruiting remains a popular choice as many companies turn to social media to find strong talent. The Global Recruiting Trends 2016 report found 47 percent of the 3,894 hiring managers surveyed say social media is the most effective employer branding tool, offering multiple outlets that provide unique features that can help with recruiting. [Continue reading…]

5. Use Your Employee Referral Program in Social Recruiting

A strong workplace culture increases business performance by engaging everyone in a united goal, values and vision. It is also essential for helping to attract and retain talent; a key element to achieving business growth. The culture of your workplace has a significant impact on your employer brand and influences the perception of working for you. It is also crucial for staff retention, as employees will look to escape a toxic culture. Furthermore, a good understanding of your current culture will enable you to hire with cultural fit in mind, helping you to find those who will thrive in your organisation and prevent costly recruitment mistakes. So how can you get an accurate picture of your workplace culture, and identify any potential areas for improvement?
[Continue reading…]

Benefits of Cloud Computing – Idexcel Cloud Computing Roundup

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1. Benefits of Cloud Computing

Based on Aberdeen Group’s Computer Intelligence Dataset, there are more than 1.6 billion permutations to choose from when it comes to cloud computing solutions.

So what, on the face of it, appears to be pretty simple is actually both complex and dynamic regardless of whether you’re in the market for networking, storage, servers, telephony, virtualisation or applications.

By making the right choices for your cloud computing technology you stand to benefit from improvements in profitability, improved time to decision, improvements in complete and on-time delivery and reduction in downtime. Read more…

2. The dirty dozen: 12 cloud security threats

Enterprises are no longer sitting on their hands, wondering if they should risk migrating applications and data to the cloud. They’re doing it — but security remains a serious concern.

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The first step in minimizing risk in the cloud is to identify the top security threats. Read more…

3. IoT revenues up 15%; cloud computing a big driver

A new report shows healthy revenues for 21 benchmarked Internet of Things (IoT) companies in the last quarter of 2015, with revenue growing by almost 15% to levels approaching $7 billion. Cloud computing and IT infrastructure are especially potent drivers of IoT revenues, as vendors help companies cope with ever increasing rivers of data. Read more…

4. Why banks are finally cashing in on the public cloud

The financial services industry has avoided entrusting its data to public cloud vendors, even as Amazon Web Services quietly acquired thousands of business users. Banks and insurance firms feared rigorous regulatory scrutiny should their data become compromised in a breach at one of their cloud vendors. Read more…

5. Jay Greene on Cloud Computing May Be Hampering Tech Spending

The transition to cloud computing – at the current snail pace doesn’t warrant ‘transformation’ rhetoric – may be getting a goose because of tightening finances in the corporate world. A time when the purported risks of cloud computing are moderated by companies hungry for cost-cutting. And that may be part of the slow-down in tech spending right now. Read more…

Big Data and Data Visualization

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In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise of unstructured data from different sources such as social media, videos and photos, and businesses are looking for relationships between data which can be viewed from multiple perspectives. This evolution of the way the data is being produced, processed and analysed is bringing drastic changes to the world around us.

Big data is a term describing large volumes of structured and unstructured data that can be analysed to gain business insights. According to Gartner, big data is a high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information asset that demands cost-effective innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making. In simpler terms, big data is lots of data produced rapidly in many different forms. This rapidly growing data could be related to online videos, customer transactional histories, social media interactions, traffic logs, cell phones, flip computers, tablets, cloud computing, Internet of Things, sensors etc., and global traffic is expected to reach more than 100 trillion gigabytes by 2025. Here is a hint what happens approximately in a minute on the internet, and the generated data continues to grow exponentially:
internet-one-minute-infographic

This huge volume of data needs to be parsed to discover useful threads that can uncover endless opportunities, and can be teamed with innovative ideas to decrease costs, improve overall customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and provide customer tailored offerings. The data requires quick analysis and information must be displayed in a meaningful way. It can be analysed for time reductions, cost reductions, smart decision making, optimizing offerings or new product development.

Big Data focuses on finding hidden trends, threads or patterns that might not be immediately or easily visible. The interpretations bring out insights that would otherwise be impossible to observe using traditional methods. This requires latest technologies and skill set to analyse the flow of information and draw results and conclusions. High powered analytics enable businesses to determine root causes of issues, defects and failures in real time, recalculate complete risk portfolios in just minutes, detect fraud, and so on. NASA, U.S.Government, and organisations like Wal-Mart and Amazon are using Big Data to recognize the possibilities that can help them capitalize the gains.

However, this huge volume of rapidly generating big data cannot be handled using traditional reporting process. To reap maximum benefits, data analytics needs to be done in real time instead of batch processing which fails to capture big data’s immediacy. Another challenge in handling big data is the increased availability of mobile devices. This requires decentralization of reports and adoption of cost-effective, faster and more democratized business intelligence model to improve collaboration and speed insights.

Data Visualization Tools

To make sense of the boring raw data and observe interesting patterns, organisations use visualization tools that help them visualize all their data in minutes. Data Visualization places data in the visual context such as trends, patterns and correlations, which helps organisations understand the significance of the data which may go undetected if this data was just text-based. This beneficial visual matter can help companies eliminate loss making products and increase revenue by minimizing waste. Data visualization can help identify areas that require attention or improvement, help understand product placement, clarify factors influencing customer behaviour and can predict sales volume.

Some of these tools are for developers and require coding, while others contain data visualization software products that do not require coding. Here are some of the commonly used data visualization tools:

1. D3.js (Data Driven Documents) uses CSS, HTML and SVG to render diagrams and charts. The tool is open-source, looks good, is packed with helpful features and is interactivity rich.
2. FusionCharts has an exhaustive collection of maps (965) and charts (90) that work across all platforms and devices, and supports browsers starting from IE6. It supports XML and JSON data formats, and can export charts in JPEG, PNG and PDF. For inspiration, there is a good collection of live demos and business dashboards. Although, the tool is slightly highly priced, it has beautiful interactions and is highly customizable.
3. Chart.js is an open source library that supports bar, line, polar, pie, radar and doughnut chart types. The tool is good for smaller hobby projects.
4. Highcharts offers good range of maps and charts right out of the box. It also offers a different feature rich package called Highstock for stock charts. The tool is free for personal and non-commercial use, and users can export charts in JPG, PNG, PDF and SVG formats.
5. Google Charts can render charts in SVG/HTML5 . It offers cross-browser compatibility and cross-platform portability to Android and iPhones.
6. Datawrapper is commonly used by the non-developers to make interactive charts. The tool is easy to use and can generate effective graphics.
7. Tableau Public is one of the most commonly used visualization tool as it supports variety of maps, graphs, charts and other graphics. The tool is free and can be easily embedded in any webpage.

Raw, Timeline JS, Infogram, plotly, and ChartBlocks are some of the additional data visualization tools. Excel, CVS/JSON, GooGle Chart API, Flot, Raphael, and D3 are some of the entry level tools which are good to quickly explore data or create visualization for internal use.

On the other end of spectrum, there are professional data visualization Pro tools that have expensive subscriptions. There are few free alternatives as well with strong communities and support. Some of these tools include R, Weka, and Gephi.

These data based visualization tools are focussed on the front end of the big data that enable businesses to explore the information and gain deeper understanding by interacting directly with the data. On the other hand, Apache Hadoop is an open source software associated with Big Data to support the back-end concerns such as processing and storage. There are several variants of Hadoop such as MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and Amazon. Google BigQuery is a cloud-based service.

Businesses seek most cost-effective ways to increase profitability by managing volume, velocity and variety of the data and turning that data into valuable information to better understand business, customers and marketplace. However, volume, velocity and variety are no longer sufficient to describe the challenges of big data, hence more terms such as variability, veracity, value and visualization have been added that broaden the realm of the big data scope. Big Data is exploding with innovative approach and forward thinking, and organisations can exploit this opportunity to gain market advantage and increase profitability.

The Test Expert’s Role in DevOps – Idexcel Testing Roundup

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1. The Test Expert’s Role in DevOps

Is wasn’t long ago that those of us who dedicated our professional careers to helping our organizations deliver better software were asking how we fit into this new world of agile development. While individual companies and the software engineering community continue to adapt and decide whether agile is right for their businesses, there’s already another important advancement in our world: DevOps. Some see this as simply the next evolution of agile.

DevOps is a culture shift that emphasizes collaboration between software developers and other IT professionals while automating software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims to establish an environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen more rapidly, frequently, and reliably. Continue reading…

2. How Can Testers Embrace Learning and Keep the Spark Alive?

What you do today can improve all your tomorrows – Ralph Marston

IT field changes; way too fast than some of us would like.

If you are not constantly updating your skills, you could get irrelevant, obsolete and outdated. In a world of lay-off paranoia, it is a good idea to rise above it all, gain immunity and feel secure. The best way to do so is to make learning a habit. Continue reading…

3. Why No One Talks About Agile Testing!

The Agile Zone is brought to you in partnership with DZone Software. Build your own privately managed community, like Stack Overflow, for your team with AnswerHub, a DZone Software product.
When working on digital projects and products, you probably encounter the term “agile” a lot.

The word agile is widely used (and sometimes misused). It refers to the methodology of project management which strives to establish certain principles of collaboration, flexibility and transparency. It emphasizes the importance of feedback throughout the entire development workflow. Continue reading…

4. 7 Practical Software Testing Tips from TestBash Presenters

We gathered some practical software testing tips for you from presenters of TestBash Brighton, the most awesome software testing conference out there! Continue reading…

5. Discussion: How to set up a Software testing process

I have been assigned a task to create a Testing process in the company. Our company uses Agile methodology. The task is to create a generic plan which determines the role of a QA/Tester in the complete agile STLC. Scrum is what we are trying to implement.

We can assume the team of 4 developers and 1 QA. Also please suggest if a separate developer for QA-Automation is required or the same QA with limited knowledge should be hired. Currently we don’t have any automation framework. Everything is being done from scratch.

Your answers are valuable. Contribute to the discussion here!