Anametrix' Actionable Analytics Blog

There’s no shortage of articles about the problem of Big Data: the huge volume of data, growing dramatically every year, from disparate sources coming into organizations and the challenge of harnessing them for actionable insights. I’m Anders, the CTO of Anametrix: my team and I deal with this challenge every day.

Large scale data processing and integration is interesting from an engineering perspective: it has to be much different from the scale and approach you’ll find in an off-the-shelf, corporate dashboarding provider.

Since the Anametrix platform has to scale to support and provide real-time reporting of not just report-ready data cubes, but from the massive underlying data volumes, we are forced to invent new techniques for each new feature we add to the platform. It’s very challenging (and rewarding) to build a system that can provide real time reporting and queryability for an application like this.

There’s just no existing software that can do what we need to support Business Analytics and Web Analytics at the scale we need and I’m very fortunate to have a great team of architects and engineers at Anametrix that can invent and deliver this kind of software for us. I look forward to writing occasional posts about big data challenges from an engineering perspective.  What data do you have that you would love to be able to make sense of more easily? 

Before WebSideStory invented the real-time, javascript based HitBox/HBX in 1996, the only information about website visitors came from parsing through cumbersome (and certainly not real-time) log files.  Web analytics has come a long way in answering important questions like, “Where are the visitors to our website coming from? What do they do when

Nearly every day I get asked to explain the differences between Business Intelligence (BI,) Business Analytics (BA,) and other data reporting tools. Companies constantly generate data streams and there are many options to tap into that information, from free tools that offer ‘snapshots’ of a specific application to enterprise platforms that run

We've Moved! Welcome to the new home of the Actionable Analytics Blog! Thanks for being patience with us as we slowed down our posts to get this ready for you. Feel free to look around, and don't hesitate to let us know if you catch anything that's broken.  Cheers! 

I just ran across a bad graph that's been floating around the internet for a couple months after running on CNN.   As suggested here, this graph may have come to them without data and they may not have had time to replicate it. If that's the case, I think they'd have been off at least covering the uninformative legend with a meaningful one or sim