Wisdom defined most rudimentarily is a deep vested understanding of people, things, events, and phenomena resulting in the innate ability to apply these observations into perception, judgment and action. Simply put it’s the ability to observe, perceive patterns, and render those observations into positive decision-making.

We live in a world more connected than ever. Information lies at the mere press of a button. Thousands of our friends, family and acquaintances are only a click away.

In such a time there is no denying that Facebook is changing our media landscape. With more than 800 million users in its network, the size of the world’s third largest country,  it’s undeniably one of the most influential social spheres of our time. So what happens when you load all of that activity onto single analytic platform? Imagine the massive possibilities wrapped up in all of the insight gained from that analysis. That is Wisdom.

Our partners at MicroStrategy have developed an app Wisdom called which allows Facebook users to extend their knowledge beyond the insights built into the social network. By segmenting users based on detailed information it reveals insights based on each users specific interests and motivations. It uses that information to target segments with personalized content based on who they are, where they’re from, and what they like. In the words of Microstrategy, Wisdom is a powerful analytic tool, a unique way to learn about new places and things that may spark your interest, and a form of opportunistic segmentation.

With such a multitude of data flowing in and out of our daily movements, our future lies in the creation of tools to harness such data then to make sense of it. Thus Wisdom is more than an app, it is a powerful way to take the reigns of one of the most powerful networks on the internet.

When the mountain that you have to climb is steep and tall, you want to make sure you’ve packed everything you need and have what it takes to make it to the top. Because ParAccel Analytic Platform was built from the ground up for analytics, we were able to apply basic principles of design across all components of the product. It was built to ensure agility and high performance for the most complex business environments. While most products have been forced to make tradeoffs between speed, agility, and sophistication, we built them all into the product from day one.

Speed.
First, we built the fastest analytic database on the planet. That means you get analytic performance to match the speed of fleeting opportunities and uncover hidden risks. We built the product with linear scaling and an in-memory database option, so that the amount of data, number of users, or variety of data will not impede response times. Along with speed of processing, we support rapid iteration for the analyst discovery process. In addition, we built the database schema agnostic, so analysts can load the data and immediately begin analyzing the data.

Agility.
Second, we built the most comprehensive extensibility framework ever. That means we extend the speed of the database in more ways that any of our competitors. Our extension brings analytic processing power to a broad set of advanced functions stored in a library and accessible to any analyst using simple SQL. In addition, we created on-demand integration modules that pull data into the query from other databases, Hadoop, and sources of streaming data. With extreme extensibility, you can move quickly to launch new analytic applications, alter existing applications, and respond to business needs in a timely manner. ParAccel gives you remarkable insight to thrive in the midst of the extraordinary speed of business.

Sophistication.
Finally, we built our analytic platform to handle increasing levels of complexity. Complexity has to do with the increasing number of moving parts, processes, and methods used against them. An increase in any of these three dimensions can overwhelm existing systems that weren’t built for speed and agility. To make matters worse, the frequency of change makes complexity even more unmanageable. Most systems were built to handle a static set of business questions in a stable environment. ParAccel was built to handle extremely sophisticated questions in increasingly dynamic environments. You get the broadest analytic reach possible to handle the most complex business needs. No matter how simple or complex, confined or wide spread, summarized, or detailed, simple or mature your analytics, ParAccel will give you the answers you need.

There is a recurring storyline I keep hearing from ParAccel customers. When we first told them about the speed, agility, and sophistication of ParAccel, they didn’t believe us. We had to prove it to them. We did. Then, when they got ParAccel up and running, they couldn’t believe what they could do with it. In some cases ParAccel has outpaced expectations so far that the users were convinced that something was wrong with the data, or that the queries weren’t really scanning full data sets. Nothing was wrong. It’s just how we built ParAccel Analytic Database. We built it for speed, agility, and sophistication.

The countdown is under way for the United Nations in achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. With less than three years left, global attention has shifted to focusing on the most off-track of the goals; specifically target 5b, universal access to reproductive health. In lieu of rapidly approaching deadline, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is responding by focusing their efforts on population-related policies influenced by reliable data.

The UNFPA is relying on a tool developed by DevInfo, a database system endorsed by the United Nations Development Group for monitoring human development. The online data base, MDG 5b+ Info was designed to track global progress toward more available reproductive health in developing countries. The tool has been introduced to decision makers across the world at UNFPA-organized workshops to help then identify gaps and develop data-driven interventions.

In a recent workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, representatives from fourteen countries gathered to familiarize themselves with tools to unlock data, generate maps, graphs and tables to analyze progress, trends, and gaps to innovate access to reproductive health in their countries. Using the program a representative from Mali was able to visualize contraceptive prevalence beside wealth quintiles in a series of provoking graphs that revealed disparities in access to reproductive health. Such findings can now be used to negotiate better access on the policy-making level.

It’s the collection and analysis of big data on a single platform such as this that is enabling innovation and empowerment on a humanitarian level as our world population expands.

Read more about it:  
http://www.devinfo.org/devinfo_in_action/
Monitoring_reproductive_health_unfpa_2.html

My third post on unconstrained analytics speaks to the point that analysts should be able to do whatever they want to do in the discovery process in order to achieve the most valuable results. The starting place for unconstrained analytics was the ability to run any analytics, any time. Beyond that, an analytic platform should be able to support any analyst, anywhere. Finally, analysts should be able to run any kind of analytics they want to run; and they should be able to run those analytics against any data they want to analyze.

The ParAccel Extensibility Framework extends the power of the fastest analytic database in the world in any direction, encompassing the full range of analytic capabilities. That means users can analyze any way, including all of the following kinds of analysis:

Traditional analytics: Start with basic SQL, doing analytics the old way.

Existing analytics: Work with any external tool running analytic models that already exist.

Extreme analytics: Test the limits of extreme SQL with 28K queries and up to 1000 joins, combining analytics from across the enterprise.

Statistical analytics: Run statistical, data mining, and simulation algorithms, for rapid results on normally long-running applications.

Advanced analytics: Bring in advanced functions to run within the database engine for maximum performance, taking the speed of analytics to a whole new level.

Now we have a picture of what we mean by unconstrained analytics: analyze any way; any analytics, anytime; and any analyst, anywhere.