Critical path capabilities on your social integration journey

Combining the Social Integration Journey and the basic building blocks of your solution, let us look at what could be the capabilities that figure in the critical path of this journey.

The objective is to help you decide on where to invest your efforts if you are building out a solution on your own for your enterprise or if you are looking at buying a solution, what would be the critical capabilities depending on where you are, on your social journey.

Aggregating the functionality across the basic building blocks, the key capabilities are:

• Wide Social Data Source Coverage: For Listening and Monitoring, it is essential to "cast the net wide". I would go as far as to say that you should in fact include search engine results as a key component of discovering the hot spots of relevant activity on social media! You should look for support for both API-based collection as well as Web content extraction (which has definitely become way more involved than what used to be brute-force scraping techniques). Remember that the APIs are still evolving fairly rapidly and the solution should be able to evolve at the same pace too. You might also need historical data for certain use cases.
• High Data Volumes: As a corollary of the wide coverage, you will also need the ability to handle large raw data sets. You might also have to handle real-time streaming sources (which are being recommended by the social networks more) for large data sets. Aggregators like Gnip and DataSift also provide streaming for large result sets.
• Data Quality/Cleansing: To improve the Signal-to-noise ratio in the raw data set, you should be able to apply tough data cleansing/filtering rules. These could be in the form of entity recognition and matching thresholds. This could also involve use case based relevance rules for e.g. if you are looking to build the network profile of a customer, you might not be interested in the details / sentiment of their activity stream. You should be able to leverage a library of DQ rules if possible.
• Text Analytics: You will need powerful semantic and sentiment analysis capabilities to infer key signals from all the data flowing through the system. If you operate in multiple geographies, you will need the ability to do this analysis across multiple languages.
• Enterprise Data Access: A lot of value lies untapped in the intersection of the social and enterprise data domains. You should be able to seamlessly work with CRM, ERP, PLM and MDM system data as you add the social dimension to the data. 
• Collaboration: As you move further on your social journey, it is important to facilitate collaboration both among employees and between employees and customers. At the minimum, your solution should be able to interface with existing / established collaboration systems so that end-users do not need to switch between multiple screens to share/consume data.
• Publishing: Content is king in social media. Community building is the queen probably! You need well-integrated Content Publishing capabilities or at least the ability to reference/identify content items in your overall solution for end-to-end analysis of results. You will also need community platforms where you can engage and innovate with highly influential customers and influencers. 

Here is my take on the critical path of capabilities:

What do you think are the capabilities on the critical path of your social enterprise journey?

Social Data Integration journey - Where are you on it?

There are several "Stages of Evolution" thoughts around how enterprises can go about ingesting social data into their business DNA. Adding to these, from my experience creating CRM and data integration products, here is an outside-in approach for enterprises towards social media.

Companies must first map the customer journey through various social media as they interact with the company. The following depicts such a typical journey (which, in most part, applies to both B2B and B2C businesses):

Note that some of these "Events / Triggers" are actually a cumulative experience for your customers.

Once this map is created, companies can decide on how to start their own journey. A phased approach is prudent especially in the social media arena where missteps can get amplified quickly. The following illustrates this:

Importantly, this is an additive approach in that companies will have to continue to listen and monitor on a broad set of social media while participating and innovating on the most effective among these social media streams.

How are you approaching this massive opportunity? Where is your company on this journey?

In subsequent posts, I'll share my thoughts on how enterprises can derive the most of their investments in social media.


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Ram Subramanyam Gopalan - Product Management at Informatica
My LinkedIn profile | Follow me on Twitter
Views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily represent those of Informatica.
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Big Data + Big Money = Big Change

The dust has barely settled on last week’s Hadoop World and the blogosphere is still abuzz with the implications of various announcements, analyst reports and miscellaneous provocations that are inevitable in events like this.   No better time than this blogger to jump into the fray! 

My takeaway is the evidence has never been stronger that Big Data is real, and several related announcements and data points bear this out.

Hadoop World 2011 THE CUBE- James Markarian @Informaticacorp

Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv

Think End-to-End When Parsing and Visualizing Big Data in Hadoop

It has been a big, busy week at Informatica.  We introduced HParser, the industry's data parser for Hadoop. As part of the launch activities, we recorded a video discussion on parse and visualize Big Data, featuring Brett Sheppard from Zettaforce, Ronen Schwartz, Vice President of B2B Products at Informatica, and Karl Van den Bergh, Vice President, Product and Alliances at Jaspersoft. The discussion helps you understand the approaches to extend Jaspersoft business intelligence (BI) and Informatica data integration investments to leverage data stored in Hadoop. HParser is designed to reduce the need for manually written Map/Reduce scripts.  You can also check out the chalktalk and product demonstration of HParser .

Pace of innovation for Hadoop has been rapid.  One of the reasons that we are seeing this accelerated rate of growth in Hadoop is that the Hadoop community and vendors across the relevant data computing infrastructures seem very engaged. 

Why We Built HParser

Free Your Data!

Much has been written in the blogosphere recently of Oracle's Public Cloud announcement at the recent Oracle OpenWorld, and what (according to Larry) it means for data portability and the integration industry in general.

Quoting Larry from his keynote, comparing with Salesforce.com:  "Our cloud's a little bit different ... our cloud is based on industry standards and supported full interoperability with other clouds. ... you can take any existing Oracle database you have and move it to our cloud.  Just move it across and it runs unchanged.  Oh by the way, you can move it back if you want to."  He went on to say that Force.com is the "roach model of cloud services" due to its use of custom/proprietary programming languages like APEX.  "You can check in, but you can't check out."





 This makes for entertaining press, but the subtext here is that all one needs for data integration is some open standard APIs and the ability to run an Oracle database instance anywhere.  In other words, it's all about portability.

Perhaps.  If you have chosen to delegate all of your data to an Oracle-only software stack, then knowing you are "free" to run that database pretty much anywhere you want may feel liberating, freeing you from the dark forces of vendor lockin.  In other words, avoid data lockin by ... wait for it ... consenting to lock in your data to one vendor's database?   Really? And this coming from one of the great industry consolidators of  the last decade, a strategy whose success depends on the maintenance revenue of customers keeping their data right where it is.

2012 Predictions Season already starting - Big Data front and center

2012 predictions season seems to be starting early this year, and not surprisingly Big Data is showing up on everybody's lists. The top 10 list from Nucleus Research caught my eye, not because of the obligatory Big Data listing (it showed up as #5), but because of how relevant Big Data is to several other trends that were listed.

As frequent readers of this blog will soon recognize as a common theme here - the real value in Big Data is in the opportunities it creates, far beyond solving its "big mess" management problems. In other words, maximizing the return on data.

Without going into the details of Nucleus' report (free download can be found here) specific areas that seem particularly ripe for Big Data related opportunity include:

The Real Value of Big Data

So you're an IT manager (or an architect, or a business analyst, ...), and a vendor tells you that the amount of data in your org is exploding, and unless you buy from them RIGHT NOW, then you'll be left with an unmanageable Big Mess. By now you have probably heard it often enough that you're not sure whether to believe it. You've gotten this far without the latest newfangled tool from company X, you're not yet up to your eyeballs in messes, so why the urgency? Why not just keep doing what you're doing?

Good question. Actually, any vendor that tries to sell this way is missing the point. I've heard the same pitches - enough times to wonder if they are all just copying the same script. "You're drowning in data, blah blah." Where's the imagination? Instead the point should be about the opportunities to be seized, not the problems to solve. It should be about the business value of that data - and helping you understand how you can benefit from it. For example:

Big Data Integration with Informatica's Ash Kulkarni

What is so Big about Big Data?

Welcome to the Big Data Integration Blogspot. What is Big Data Integration? Well, Big Data is the confluence of three technology trends:

• Big Transaction Data: Massive growth of transaction data volumes
• Big Interaction Data: Explosion of interaction data such as social media, sensor technologies, call detail records, and other sources
• Big Data Processing: New very large scale processing with Hadoop and other alternatives

Big Data integration helps you fulfil the business potential of Big Data.  Well of course, you like to know what this means in the real world right?  Furthermore, Big Data can be Big in terms of business results but also in terms of risk. So in this blog, we are inviting technical professionals to share their ideas and approaches to Big Data.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts.