Eric Kavanagh: For DM Radio, yes indeed, my name is Eric Kavanagh, I will be your humble, if excitable, host for the show that is designed after all to peel away the marketing veneer so we can get down to brass tacks and figure out what is going on here in the field of information management; starting off with the latest trends in data visualization.
And obviously folks, there is plenty. It is the information age; things are moving rather swiftly. That we’ve talked about on the show.
Lots and lots of things are changing. We really are seeing this confluence of technologies. Stuff like Big Data of course is very hot in the marketplace, but other topics like agility are still out there.
And of course architecture is an increasingly hot topic. But one topic that is always going to be out there, and really is a very significant component, since it’s sort of the last mile, if you will, of insights is data visualization.
So the topic for today is: What you see is what you ‘get’. How data visualization conveys insight.
Let’s give a quick nod to our sponsor. Today’s episode of DM Radio is brought to you by InetSoft.
| #1 Ranking: Read how InetSoft was rated #1 for user adoption in G2's user survey-based index |
|
Read More |
A big thank you to all those folks who tweet every week about the show, we definitely appreciate all of that. And let’s face it Twitter is a huge, huge force these days in driving media and driving traffic to websites. I know it is very effective if you use it well, and we use it all the time. So feel free to send your tweets out there with a hash tag of DM Radio.
Eric Kavanagh: Let’s bring in our co-host and editorial director of information management magazine, Jim Ericson, and welcome back to DM Radio.
Jim Ericson: Hello, Eric good to be back.
Eric Kavanagh: Yes, indeed, so data visualization, you know, obviously it’s used in a variety of ways. Of course, dashboards can be viewed as some sort of visualization; but really I think we’re going to talk more about data visualization as it’s used to find patterns and to see outliers, for example. And that's a lot of what all this analysis stuff is all about, right? What are the outliers? What are the trends?
Jim Ericson: Yeah, that's right. That’s right. Scatter plots and things like that are really very popular. In fact, yesterday I was doing a Web seminar with one of these data visualization specialists. They were demoing direct connections to Hadoop clusters with some sort of analytic visualization tool. It’s very interesting the way all this stuff is happening.
 |
“Flexible product with great training and support. The product has been very useful for quickly creating dashboards and data views. Support and training has always been available to us and quick to respond.
- George R, Information Technology Specialist at Sonepar USA
|
I’m especially talking about the representation side of things like scatter plots and finding outliers. We’re really talking about focusing on customer groups. These are segments of our viewing audience that we really need to pay attention to. So we can look at these visualizations, but now I think it's getting much more customized towards some roles – at least in a few examples I have been seeing in the market lately.
Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, and you were talking before the show about some templates that you’ve seen that are sort of role based visualization templates from some of the bigger vendors. What's going on with all that?
Jim Ericson: Yeah, it is very interesting. Just this week, we launched our “40 vendors to watch” list. This is something we do every year. It’s an editor’s choice. We go out and we talk to a lot of our analyst friends in the market. They tell us who they think is interesting this year and what's going on with them. We expected to hear about visualization providers and we did. There are probably eight of them on our list this year. You can find them at the website. There is a slideshow dedicated to each type, for Big Data, for visualization, for BI, and so on.