We start with PASS President Bill Graziano who leads off with talking about the growth of data analytics over the past few years. Connect.Share.Learn. If you are reading this and don’t know, SQL Saturday Chicago is this weekend. I’ll be presenting there.
Matt Wolken from Dell/Quest takes the stage to discuss Business Intelligence. Talks about the rate of change in the BI space. Talking about how the shifting demographics of social media are influencing spending. Mentioning great increases in mobile computing. Mentions the tweet from the Hudson River. Analytics used to backwards looking, now it’s looking forward and revenue driving. Companies that implement BI and BA solutions tend to be more profitable (13%). Dell has a new social command center to monitor feedback and support.
Now, we welcome Microsoft Keynote speakers Amir Netz and Kamal Hathi to the stage. Amir, is talking about his Apple II and how he programmed extensively on it. Mentions using VisiCalc and Lotus 123. Talking about how spreadsheets evolved into OLAP. Kamal is now talking about how OLAP evolved into Hadoop, and how do business users understand usage of tools in the big data space. Yet it all comes back to excel, I suspect this will come back to Powerview and data explorer. I shall refrain from editorial content, but ZOOMIT. Excel is getting much better at dealing with external data. Compares evolution of cars from model T to BMW. Amir is talking about how BI is now at the stage of the early slide projector. PowerView is awesome.
Microsoft is doing a nice job of using sentiment analysis from Twitter in this demo, to demonstrate American Idol success predictions. The data shows that positive sentiment is key into American Idol. Explains how Twitter has changed the dynamics of how people watch TV. This means if you are showing something that should be live–SHOW IT LIVE (I’m talking about bike and F1 racing, NBC Sports Network)
Seeing a new excel plugin called geo flow, which lays out spatial data within excel, this functionality has been getting better, but this is really nice. GeoFlow has the ability to zoom in via touch, very nice, and additionally it has a replay functionality. Outstanding graphics and functionality.
And that’s a wrap…more tomorrow