Database Reference
In-Depth Information
While we covered one vendor's move to limit the piracy of their intellec-
tual property, you can see how a Big Data analytics platform such as the one
provided by IBM could be applied in various ways. For example, one “watch-
dog” client sifted through countless web-posted pages of a country's parlia-
mentary attendance and voting records to draw strong correlations and shine
the spotlight on a particular representative's behavior in an elected position
(which was underwhelming in this case because of the number of votes the
representative missed).
Another client used the same concepts of building a dictionary of verbiage
around sentiment and applied it to creating an understanding of log files (we
talk about this usage pattern later in this chapter). For example, an IP address
has a certain structure to it (IPv4 or IPv6), a monitoring agent has a name
(such as Nagios), and so on. Is there a correlation between the name of the
monitoring agent on the application server and the database server?
Finally, an investment house is scraping IT-based company's public text-
based (HTML) earning reports to look for “tells” or signs within the disclo-
sure as to the health of the business, or guidance in commentary about its
future performance and so on. You can imagine comparing the services rev-
enue stream across different companies (such as Hewlett Packard and IBM)
could be very useful, but each company is likely to name these divisions dif-
ferently; for example, Hewlett Packard calls it “HP Enterprise Services” and
IBM calls it “IBM Global Services.” It's a daunting task to manually assemble
this information across a large scale of market participants, but it's a much
easier one if you built text extractors that defined how to identify a company's
name and services department name, then perhaps crawled the Web with
Nutch (an open source web search engine based on Apache Lucene) to pull
the commentary relating to that division for each company of interest.
Customer State:
Or, Don't Try to Upsell Me When I Am Mad
Studies seem to indicate that customer service is getting worse, whether it's
due to outsourcing, aggressive time-to-resolution metrics, the economy, or
cutbacks, among others. Many people find it hard to recall the last time they
had a great customer experience. The quality of service is often up to an indi-
vidual, rather than the business. (We've all had that experience: calling back
