Happy Holidays from Kognitio!

Dear reader

From all of us at Kognitio, we would like to wish you all the very best this holiday season and for the New Year. We would also like to thank you for your continued support throughout 2010. It's been another great year for Kognitio and we're very grateful to all of you for our continued growth - new products, new awards, new customers and new partners.

As you know, we're committed to helping organizations derive more value and actionable insight out of their ever-increasing data volumes at a considerably lower cost. So if you're faced with the challenge of implementing or running analytic solutions that won't cost you a fortune, then come and talk to us.

Here's to an even better 2011!

Festive greetings and warm wishes from the entire Kognitio team

2010 highlights for Kognitio Product news:
:: WX2 Appliance range
:: Kognitio wins Vision award
:: Kognitio wins Innovative award

Featured customers:
:: Segmetrix' Match2Lists.com
:: American Access Casualty Company
:: bet365

New partners:
:: Hosted Solutions - DaaS hosting
:: Capgemini - cloud computing alliance
:: Panopticon - visual analysis tool
:: Quomation - DaaS pricing service
:: ITB - South Africa
:: Poslovna Inteligencija - Croatia
:: Umanis - France
:: GNOSYS Technology - Australia

New!
:: Catch Kognitio on YouTube at the KognitioWX2 channel
www.youtube.com/kognitiowx2

Announcing the Kognitio YouTube channel

We're excited about our new YouTube channel where you can learn more about Kognitio and our WX2 analytical database in the form of short videos around a certain theme. Have a look at the channel and already you can see an introduction to WX2 as well as our viewpoint on the eternal "which is better, row-based or columnar database?" question. Moreover, you'll see customer viewpoints as well as more details on how WX2 delivers the performance it does, thanks to its in-memory nature, its shared nothing architecture and the fact that it is a MPP (massively parallel processing) database.

Subscribe to the channel now and be the first to see new content when it appears.

The channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/kognitiowx2

Here is the introductory video to WX2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHx3LsBDVA

Here is the video that discusses the row vs columnar debate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apeURjTzodU

And here is the video that discusses how WX2 offers the performance it does:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-rwzmI1vLo

Looking for the diamonds in the data

When dealing in data analytics, organizations don’t care about individual numbers such as birth dates or social security numbers. They do care about customer habits; they want to know things like how old they are, their annual household income, what their buying habits are, and things like that.

It’s not because they want to do anything bad with that data; quite the contrary. The more companies know about people, the better they can market to them…the better they can anticipate their needs and wishes, and not spam them with stuff for which they have absolutely no use.

The responsible use of personal data benefits everyone. For instance, when customers shop online sites like Amazon.com, they’re already seeing this kind of behavior in use. After they click on an item, chances are the next window says something like, “People like you also liked,” and there’s a list of other products that are tailored to their demographic. This is not an invasion of their privacy; they’ve agreed to provide certain information to the vendor, and allowed them to use it to market more effectively to them.

And every time they go to the grocery store and swipe their loyalty card, they’re allowing the grocer to know exactly which products they’re buying, how often, and what their shopping patterns are. In return, they get discounts every week off their grocery bill.

Responsible marketers and vendors need to do a better job of conveying the benefits of sharing information. This is increasingly important as the U.S. government considers a “do not track” bill, which would allow consumers to easily say “no thanks” to online marketers who want to follow their click-trails.

Such a law makes perfect sense, but there is an inherent need to better communicate to consumers the advantages associated with making use of the information they share with retailers and vendors, making it abundantly clear that…no…they don’t care about them as individuals. But they do care about them as people.