Data mining, data warehousing, decision support, OLAP, OLTP and knowledge discovery
make up the universe of D S * ( dsstar ), the only executive business newsletter
supporting strategic employment of these technologies.
The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** September 15, 1998: Vol. 2, No. 37 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:
KRISHNAKUMAR RAMANUJAM ON EFFECTIVE MULTIMEDIA DATA MINING
BENEFITS ANALYSIS FOR HEALTHCARE
BY SID ADELMAN
MICHAEL BURWEN EVALUATES THE DATA WAREHOUSING MARKET
ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY
DATA MINING TAKES A LEAF OUT OF JURASSIC PARK
by Krishnakumar Ramanujam
This week, executive editor at large Inderpal Bhandari presents a guest
column by Krishnakumar Ramanujam, Chief Technology Officer of Virtual Gold,
Inc. (VGI). He leads the team involved in the design and development of
VGI's new data mining technologies, and of applications based on these
technologies. From 1994-1997, he worked for IBM at their Software
Development Center in Bangalore, India, and at the T. J. Watson Research
Center, Hawthorne, NY. While with IBM, he played a key role in the
development of IBM's Advanced Scout, a data mining program used extensively
by coaches of the National Basketball Association to devise new strategies
based on the automatic identification of hidden patterns in game data and
video. He was educated at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
(M.Tech., 1994, B. Tech., 1990)
Ramanujam writes: "Recently, I read a report about cities in the US where
the police constantly monitored several blocks of streets using automatic
surveillance equipment. A few nights ago, I also watched a program on CNN
that described an entire city in the UK that was under automatic
surveillance. The program went on to talk about the trend of increasing use
of automatic surveillance by law enforcement agencies, increasing numbers
of walled communities, and increasing numbers of prisons. These trends
suggest that large amounts of multimedia data are being gathered. Using
these data efficiently and correctly, is, of course, a different question
altogether."
BENEFITS ANALYSIS FOR HEALTH CARE: PART I
by Sid Adelman
Sid Adelman is President of Sid Adelman & Associates, a Sherman Oaks,
California based consulting firm specializing in data warehouse and
strategic data architecture. He co-authored a methodology and project
planning tool tailored for data warehouses. Sid is an international
speaker at data warehouse and industry conferences. He has written a
number of articles on data warehouse and has chapters on data quality and
organizational and cultural issues in Data Warehouse: A Practical Guide
from the Experts.
Readers may find that Adelman's two-part analysis has much relevance for
industries other than healthcare. Adelman observes: "The data warehouse has
a remarkable potential for benefits in the health care industry. The
benefits will be both tangible and intangible. For the tangible benefits,
an organization should be able to estimate specific cost savings and
increases in revenue. This template indicates potential benefits and
suggests the formulas for calculating those benefits. This analysis of
benefits is aimed at organizations that provide health care and
organizations that insure health care."
DATA WAREHOUSING MARKET POISED FOR GROWTH
NewsEdge Corporation has noted that a report out today from the Palo
Alto Management Group (PAMG) predicts that data warehousing and decision
support systems will undergo a 50 percent growth rate per year over the
next five years, ending the Year 2002 with a $113 billion a year market.
According to Michael P. Burwen, the director of the market research study
report, during 1997, users spent nearly $15 billion on data warehousing
worldwide.
EQUIFAX ANNOUNCES IMPRESSIVE RESULTS USING
NEURISTICS CHECK AUTHORIZATION RISK MODEL
Equifax, a leader in consumer and business information, and Neuristics
Corporation, a leading provider of intelligent decision-support tools, have
announced the first year's results of the implementation of an advanced
artificial-intelligence (AI) model to reduce risk in check authorizations.
Through use of the model, Equifax's retail customers have realized
increased sales through greater approval rates and achieved increased
efficiencies in the check authorization process.
ACTION ITEMS
Bank Technology News Focuses on
Information Discovery's Pattern Warehouse
As financial institutions move to aggressively sell new products ranging
from insurance to mutual funds, they need to rely on the huge amounts of
data that hold patterns of customer behavior, product cross sell
affinities, profitability indicators, etc. Yet mining these large databases
by business users was a challenge until, Bank Technology News asserts,
Information Discovery introduced the Pattern Warehouse as a repository that
holds historical patterns rather than historical data.
Constellar Announces WarehouseBuilder for Oracle Express
Constellar Corporation, the Enterprise Application Integration Company,
has announced a new release of Constellar WarehouseBuilder with native
support for Oracle Express and enhanced features that deliver unprecedented
throughput for building and maintaining large, complex data warehouses and
marts. The combination of Constellar Hub, the company's market-leading
transformation engine, and Constellar WarehouseBuilder is designed to
create the first comprehensive EAI solution to integrate enterprise data
across both operational and decision support systems, regardless of a
company's platforms or application requirements.
MicroStrategy Announces Co-Marketing Efforts with IBM
MicroStrategy Incorporated, a leading provider of mission-critical
decision support systems, has announced that it has entered into a
co-marketing initiative with IBM to market IBM's DB2 Universal Database and
Lotus Notes products in conjunction with MicroStrategy's newly-announced
DSS Broadcaster product.
Digital Archaeology Creates Discovery Suite
A company called Digital Archaeology has developed an "adaptive software
architecture," based on relational calculus, that allows for the processing
of disparate structured or unstructured data. The product lets users work
outside the bounds of how the data was originally structured.
Fourth Tier in the Wings for SAP R/3 Applications
SAP is in the early stages of adding a new virtual computing tier to its
R/3 architecture as part of an effort to simultaneously address
performance, scalability, and data-access issues. This fourth tier of
distributed caching servers will reside between SAP application servers
and back-end servers and will augment SAP's application servers as they
deliver data to front-end clients.
Intel and Server Industry Leaders Demonstrate
High-performance Clustering, VI Architecture Solutions
Intel Corporation and server industry leaders have demonstrated at Comdex
Enterprise, breakthrough enterprise class performance and scalability with
the world's first 16-node Pentium II Xeon processor-based server cluster
using Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture components. VI Architecture, with
support from over 130 industry leaders, establishes standard interfaces for
the hardware and software used to communicate within a cluster of servers
or workstations.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
(T)he longest journey begins with a single step, but it must be
the right step.
CONFERENCES & SEMINARS 09.15.98
D S * INFORMATION
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