Big Data Bubbles Up Trouble!

Today Big Data has made the impossible, possible. Collecting and analyzing unstructured data types such as social media data, web click streams, network and data center logs is no longer a daunting task. While Hadoop and MapReduce are the technologies behind the scenes to crunch massive volumes of data, advanced visualizations have become the art that show us the best (and worst) parts about our data.

Out of all types of different visualization styles, bubble charts are unique in the sense that they allow you to show hundreds of individual values at once! They are the perfect visualization for showing data sets that have a high degree of distribution in their frequency. Let me give you a couple examples:

Example # 1 – A call center looking at hourly tickets, on a week by week basis, to understand what issues cause the most service calls. Optimizing the call center performance requires analyzing average call duration as well as call wait times, for each service issue. This can be 1000s of calls every hour of every day. How you graph this? With a bubble chart that shows:

• X axis – days of the week
• Y axis – hours of the day
• Color of the bubbles – reason for the call / service issue
• Size of the bubbles – quantity of calls or call duration or call wait time

Example # 2 – A marketing organization looking to improve its branding and customer sentiment. What is the best way to visualize their online presence such as tweets as well as other social media sentiments?

• X axis – previous week vs. current week, for a week over week analysis
• Y axis – their company and their major competitors
• Color of the bubbles – keywords such as “bad quality” or “crash”
• Size of the bubbles – volumes (# of tweets) or the intensity of the sentiment (e.g. “hate”, “worst”, “like”, “love”, etc.)

Want to see this in action? Check out this 3 minute video to find out how a bubble chart can help you visualize your data.

What are your data troubles? Do you have the Big Data technology and the advanced visualizations required to see it? I would love to hear more use cases of this visualization. So, drop me a line at @farnazerfan or leaving a comment below.

– Farnaz Erfan, Product Marketing, Pentaho

This blog was originally posted on Business Intelligence from the Swamp.

The Power of Location in Your Data

Did you know that 70 percent of all business data contains a location component? With this increasing amount of location-based data, geo-mapping visualizations can help you detect geographic trends, such as customer clusters or outliers.

For marketers, sales executives and product managers, these types of visualizations are critical in understanding customer demographics. Determining where your best markets are concentrated or analyzing your sales performance against incoming demand, keeps you one step ahead of the competition.

Pentaho’s new geographic data visualizations can help you answer fundamental questions, such as:

• Where are my customers located?
• Which countries visit my website the most?
• Which regional marketing campaigns are working?
• Are my sales territories and client clusters aligned?
• Which stores are carrying the most shipping costs?
• Where is my mobile app used the most?

Powerful, isn’t it? For a quick peek at Pentaho’s new geo-mapping visualization capability, watch this three minute video.

What location-based data are you tracking? Let me know by leaving a comment.

– Farnaz Erfan, Product Marketing, Pentaho

This blog was originally posted on Business Intelligence from the Swamp.