Blog Assignment #4 ’s Law, Cloud Computing, and DW/BI

Cloud computing is creating a new era for IT by providing a set of services that appear to have infinite capacity, immediate deployment, and high availability at trivial cost. The cloud appeals to organizations struggling with expanding data volumes, low utilization of IT assets, and lack of self-service business analytics. 

Breakthrough 1

Microsoft 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW)

Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a next-generation platform built to run your data analysis fast and to scale storage from a few terabytes to over 6 petabytes in a single appliance. PDW ships to your data center as an appliance with hardware and software pre-installed and pre-configured for maximum performance. With PDW’s Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) design, queries run in minutes instead of hours, and in seconds instead of minutes in comparison to today’s Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) databases.

Breakthrough 2

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure, as Microsoft's cloud platform, is an open and flexible cloud computing system that can build infrastructure, develop modern applications, gain insights from data, and manage identity and access.

Azure is the only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader for both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This powerful combination of managed and unmanaged services lets you build, deploy, and manage applications any way you like for unmatched productivity.

Availability is not merely Disaster Recovery in the cloud, it’s the empowering connection between a datacenter and the cloud for protection and value creation. With today’s announcement, Microsoft provides comprehensive Availability on Demand in Azure for hybrid and heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to harness a near unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for dev/test, cloud bursting, migration, reporting/analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention.

Citation:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-azure/

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/26/hybrid-cloud-without-the-hassle-simply-connect-to-azure-with-availability-on-demand/

http://www.teradata.com/Resources/Web-Casts/Exploring-Cloud-Computing-Options-for-Data-Warehousing/#sthash.oiD5lWki.dpuf

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn520808.aspx

MIS 587 Blog 3 Presentation and Visualization Methods

Financial Industry

For the financial industry, I am primarily focusing on the personal banking account visualization in the banking industry, specifically. There are many ways to display information about how a user’ expense look like.

1.       A bar graph with each bar representing a category of accumulating expense over a period of time or the whole lifetime of the banking account, such as education, travel, etc.

2.       A line chart represents the trend of the user’s total expense over a period time. For example, the amount of total expense of a week or a month will be a point on the graph and a line will link all the points.

3.       A monthly statement that contains all the detail of transcations.

My recommendation for the banking account users would be use of a pie chart showing percentage of expense for each of the categories. An example below from the Bank of America dashboard would be a good example to illustrate this.

https://www.bankofamerica.com/onlinebanking/financial-management-tools.go 

In this way, users/ customers can easily understand how their expenses distribute and it is very important. Most users have higher priority concern over how they spend their money, rather than emphasizing when they spend, thus a pie graph is better than a line chart. Moreover, it is more user-friendly to customers comparing a bar chart or a data-intensive statement.

Insurance Industry

Standing from the customer perspective, each type of insurance they buy probably just a monthly payment email or letter in the regular time, in spite of the accident happens. Those bills do not make too much sense to most customers when they ask the following question, why my offer is so expensive, even though I never break a law. It seems more frequent in car insurance companies. Thus, visualization of users performance data is critical and would be a competitive advantage in this industry.

A bar graph is good for this task. It can show how each factor such as braking, sharp turn impacts the driver’s evaluation and the premium he/she pays. Then they will get a good idea of what a good driver is.

https://edgewatertech.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/sma-ubi-table.jpg 

In addition to this, users can also get a similar bar graph based report to see how they actually perform, such as how many miles the driver travel, how often the driver travel during the night time, and how many times of sudden brake happen.

The visualization is good is because they can both let the drivers exactly know the criterion of being a good driver and how they actually perform, which can be used to optimize their driving pattern/habit and make them safer.

Telecommunication Industry

Almost everyone receives his/her phone bill every month. Since many Americans do not have fixed phone plan, they will choose pre-paid plan or choose pay by use plan. Under this situation, it will be better for customers know how much usage they use and how much money they need to pay over time. It is even better to show the trend as well as the average bill amount for them. A combination of Bar Chart and Line Chart would be great for this. Each bar will represent a total bill amount for each month and different portion of each bar represent different categories of charges such as phone call, text, and data. The green line represents the average expense for the total phone bills over time.

http://www.mudomaha.com/sites/default/files/inline_library/2014%20Level%20Payment%20Graph_1.jpg

In this way, customers can understand how their monthly phone bill and usage look like and the budget function (the green line) also will be convenient for them to estimate their monthly budget.