Big data Archives - Amick Brown

Get to Know Amick Brown! Meet Arun Sullia

Karen Gildea — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 17:31:14 +0000

SPOTLIGHT – Arun Sullia, Partner and Principal Consultant

As a Partner and Principal Consultant at Amick Brown, Arun is responsible for business development, maintaining trusted relationships with customers and providing solutions and direction. Arun served as a Solution Architect at AT&T and then Accenture with a focus on SAP ERP, Data Analytics and Technology Architecture. Arun joined Amick Brown to lead its first ever project and has since then worked with our partner companies helping to win and execute work for Amick Brown. Arun, along with the other Amick Brown partners, has been successfully working on the expansion of Amick Brown’s business into the public sector and the Cloud domain. He is also responsible for establishing and overseeing Amick Brown’s subsidiary, Amick Brown India.

Arun has all-around experience in the IT industry across functional and technical domains throughout his 24-year career. He has experience in functional areas such as Finance, Supply Chain, Human Resources and Real Estate providing support in Architecture, Strategy, Vendor Selection and ERP and Analytics Solutions. He has performed various roles covering the entire software development lifecycle and numerous technologies from the development and management of complex technology landscapes to the nitty gritty troubleshooting of technical issues.

Arun has been an avid hiker since his college days and continues even now with many hiking and backpacking trips. In 2019 he has done several hikes in the California Sierras including the feat of climbing Mount Whitney in one day. He has a keen interest in history, economics and the financial markets. He also likes to spend time on sports, cooking, winemaking and music. He is a hobby guitarist and enjoys playing rock, blues and jam music.

Arun lives in San Ramon, California, with his wife of 18 years and two children who are also budding musicians.

Follow Amick Brown at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amick-brown-llc

Connect to Arun through Arun’s LinkedIn Profile. We hope to hear from you.

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Get to Know Amick Brown! Meet Sameer Gandhi

Karen Gildea — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 16:23:42 +0000

SPOTLIGHT – Sameer Gandhi, Managing Partner

As one of the Managing Partners of Amick Brown, Sameer delivers tangible business value to Amick Brown’s clients by working closely with customers and partners to maximize client’s investment in Enterprise systems, lowering TCO and cultivating mutually beneficial bi-directional relationships. For the past 29 years, Sameer has performed various roles in consulting companies as well as large IT organizations managing large onsite and offshore teams and building highly scalable data analytics solutions. Sameer provides strategic services such as Analytics Assessment, Readiness, Technology Selection, Development of short term and long-term roadmap for Amick Brown customers.

Sameer is also involved in coaching and leadership support for youth in the community through the Boy Scouts of America and the national honor society called Order of the Arrow. He spent a few years as a Scoutmaster of a large troop, Troop 888 in San Ramon, CA. As a mentor for the scouts working on the rank of Eagle, the highest rank of the Boy Scouts, Sameer mentors and provides opportunities for young scouts to become responsible, participating citizens and leaders.

One of Sameer’s passions is long-distance running. In the past 6 years, Sameer has successfully completed numerous local as well as international marathons. The Big Sur International Marathon and the Mumbai Marathon are his favorite marathon events. Sameer enjoys spending time outdoors. He and his friends recently climbed Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the lower 48 states with a height of 14,508 ft.

Sameer lives in San Ramon, CA with his wife of 23 years. He has a son who is currently in college working on his undergraduate studies.

Follow Amick Brown at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amick-brown-llc

Connect to Sameer through Sameers’s LinkedIn Profile. We hope to hear from you.

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Amick Brown Receives Notification of Intent to Award

Karen Gildea — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:19:10 +0000

Amick Brown was recently notified by the County of Sacramento of an Intent to Award for Request for Proposal #8540 to provide IT Staffing services to the County in support of their IT requirements and projects. The County’s purchasing division received 59 responses with 33 being selected. Amick Brown fell just behind IBM in the ranking.

We are excited to get to work!

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Amick Brown Receives ISO 9001 Certification

Karen Gildea — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 23:12:40 +0000

July 17, 2018 Amick Brown is proud to announce that we have been awarded ISO 9001 certification. The ISO 9001 standard is the world’s most widely recognized quality management system (QMS) certification. With more than 1 million companies certified in over 170 countries, ISO 9001 defines requirements for companies who want to ensure that their products and services consistently meet customer requirements and to continually improve their business processes. ISO 9001:2015 is the current version of the standard that can be applied to any size company in any industry. This standard is based on a number of quality management principles including a strong customer focus, risk based thinking, the commitment of top management, the process approach and continual improvement.

Our decision to pursue ISO 9001 accreditation supports our commitment to providing high-quality services to our clients and to our goals of continual improvement. We have developed our quality management system in order to improve overall performance, to maintain a high-level of quality with regard to our services and to focus on customer satisfaction.

To become ISO 9001 compliant, Amick Brown developed key process plans and documentation, a quality manual, measurement, communication and purchasing plans, as well as processes to track non-conformances and corrective actions. We would like to acknowledge The Core Solution.com – ISO Experts for Small Businesses (www.thecoresolution.com) for helping us to understand the standard, providing training to our team and guidance as we built processes to ensure our compliance.

Amick Brown underwent two comprehensive audits by Perry Johnson Registrars, Inc. (www.pjr.com) in order to achieve the certification. We are proud to say that there were no non-conformances noted.

We look forward to providing high quality services to our clients and to continual improvement.

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Forrester Consulting Study Finds 171% ROI on SAP BusinessObjects Analytics

Sheri Tate — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 23:48:23 +0000

By Anita Gibbings, SAP Sr Director BI Product Marketing

You know that there is plenty of money locked up in your data. But does your investment in analytics really pay off? Isn’t SAP too expensive to provide a great return on investment? The answer is a resounding ‘NO.’ In fact, Forrester Consulting found a pay-back period of under six months. Now if only all your projects had that kind of result!

You imagine what it would be like to have the right insights at your fingertips. To be able to see into the future with your real-time data and to predict the results of your decisions. The SAP BusinessObjects Analytics portfolio can get you there.

That’s why we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct in-depth interviews with four customers on the value of an SAP analytics investment. Their financial analysis found that investing in SAP BusinessObjects Analytics had a risk-adjusted 171% return on investment and a net present value of $10.24 million for a three-year analysis period. (See this infographic of the highlights.)

In addition, SAP provides a complete, unified solution of all analytics capabilities for every line of business—data discovery, visualization, planning, predictive, and governance—avoiding all the problems with the creation of silos.

So How Did These Customers Achieve Such Outstanding Results?

1)Transformative Business Process Improvement

Forrester’s results found a 60% cost savings on tasks when the customer was able to visualize the data across multiple silos and identify best practice processes. One of the customers interviewed was able to take a task that on average used to cost $10,000 down to only $4,000 and as a result achieved risk-adjusted savings of $2.4 million annually. Being able to achieve 360° transparency can enable completely re-thinking processes, find ways to innovate, and help transform your business.

2)Predictive Power

What if you could predict the future and reduce your risks and incidents by 30%? An example in the study is of a transportation company who is using their data to predict which drivers are at risk of an accident through assembling real-time risk variables. By intervening with those drivers, they have been able to reduce the number of accidents and, in risk adjusted terms, save $3.2 million annually.

In doing so, they had achieved an unexpected benefit of an additional $1.9 annual savings because driver turnover dropped due to this practice of taking care of employees. Every industry is different, but I am sure you can imagine the risks and associated costs for your industry and imagine how seeing into the future could help you mitigate those risks.

3)Self-Service Time Savings

Do you have an image of SAP as not user-friendly and agile? Well, it’s time to revisit your assumptions! Forrester Consulting found that by using SAP BusinessObjects Analytics, customers were able to reduce report creating time to 1 hour.

One customer that they surveyed pointed to saving 28,800 hours, which would be the equivalent of about 14 full-time employees. Imagine all of the additional insights and cost savings those people could find when they can visualize data so quickly.

4)Integrated Planning and Financial Consolidation

SAP offers a complete end-to-end solution that provides many benefits. If you want to read more about how companies that have integrated their business intelligence and planning actually experience far fewer problems than those using different software tools. The Forrester study discusses a company that virtually eliminated 200 hours of financial consolidation and normalization time using the SAP BusinessObjects planning functionality.

There’s a reason that SAP is the market leader in analytics with more than 65,000 customers and a brand that you can trust to deliver a solid return on your investment.

– See more at: http://blog-sap.com/analytics/2017/01/05/forrester-consulting-study-finds-171-roi-on-sap-businessobjects-analytics/#sthash.T20LOmf4.dpuf

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In the New Digital Economy, Everything Can Be Digitized and Tracked : Now What?

amick.brown — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 11:04:04 +0000

by Pierre Leroux, Director, Predictive Analytics Product Marketing

Welcome to a world where digital reigns supreme. Remember when the Internet was more of a ‘push’ network? Today, it underpins how most people and businesses conduct transactions – providing peer-to-peer connections where every single interaction can be tracked.

Enterprises are still not taking full advantage. With hundreds of millions of people connected, it’s possible for them to connect their suppliers with their customers and their payment systems, and reach the holy grail of seamlessly engaging in commerce, where a transaction can be tracked from purchase, to order received, to manufacturing, through to shipment— all in real time. It’s clear that end-to-end digitization delivers enormous potential, but it has yet to be fully tapped by most companies.

In the latest #askSAP Analytics Innovations Community Webcast, Reimagine Predictive Analytics for the Digital Enterprise, attendees were given an introduction to SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics, along with some key use cases. The presentation covered native in-memory predictive analytics, deploying predictive analytics on Big Data, and how to bring predictive insight to Business Intelligence (BI).

The live, interactive call was moderated by SAP Mentor Greg Myers and featured expert speakers Ashish Morzaria, Global GTM Director, Advanced Analytics, and Richard Mooney, Lead Product Manager for Advanced Analytics.

The speakers noted that companies used to become leaders in their industries by establishing an unbeatable brand or by having a supply chain that was more efficient than anyone else’s. While this is still relevant in the digital economy, companies now have to think about how they can turn this new digital economy to their advantage. One of the keys is turning the digital economy’s key driver —the data— to their advantage.

Companies embracing digital transformation are outperforming those who aren’t. With predictive analytics, these companies can use historical data to predict behaviors or outcomes, answer “what-if” questions, and ensure employees have what they need to make optimized decisions. They can fully leverage customer relationships with better insight, and make meaningful sense of Big Data.

One big question delved into during the call: How can companies personalize each interaction across all channels and turn each one into an advantage? The answer: By getting a complete digital picture of their customers and applying predictive analytics to sharpen their marketing focus, optimize their spend, redefine key marketing activities, and offer product recommendations tailored to customers across different channels.

Real-World Customer Stories

The call also focused on some real-world examples of customers achieving value by using and embedding predictive analytics in their decisions and operations, including Cox Cable, Monext, M-Bank, and Mobilink.

These companies have been able to improve performance across thousands of processes and decisions, and also create new products, services, and business models. They’ve squeezed more efficiencies and margins from their production assets, processes, networks, and people.

One key takeaway is the importance of using algorithms, as they provide insights that can make a business process more profitable or competitive, and spotlight new ways of doing business and new opportunities for growth.

The speakers also presented a very detailed customer case study on Harris Logic. The company is using SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics for automated analytics and rapid prototyping of their models. They execute models into SAP HANA for real-time predictions using a native, logistical regression model. This approach is allowing for the identification of key predictors that more heavily influence a behavioral health outcome.

Learn More

Lots of food for thought. See what questions people were asking during the webcast and get all of the answers here. Check out the complete presentation, and continue to post your questions and watch for dates for our upcoming webcast in the series via Twitter using #askSAP.

AmickBrown.com

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Why SAP HANA and Spark for Big Data Predictive Analytics

amick.brown — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 13:13:51 +0000

By David Jonker,

Sr Director SAP Big Data Product Marketing, Technology & Innovation Platform

Big Data offers analysts and data scientists the opportunity to build more sophisticated and more accurate predictive models than before, but without the right data environment, it’s not easy. It requires an in-memory architecture that supports thousands of columns and billions of rows and a predictive analytics tool that can harness that architecture, such as SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.

Twentieth-century technology is insufficient. Blame it on the disk. Back in the 1980s, database engineers saw a world where memory was extremely expensive. Just one terabyte of RAM cost over $100 million US dollars. Today, we can get it for less than $5,000 US dollars. So, vendors built database architectures centered on the disk.

In a Big Data world, the disk is simply too slow. Consider this: reading 1 petabyte of data off a disk sequentially – i.e. no seeking, just end-to-end straight off the disk – takes 58 days using the fastest hard disk available today (according to the Tom’s Hardware website). SSD definitely speeds things up: two days with the fastest SSD RAID. It’ll cost millions to buy, though.

In many ways, Big Data is a real-time data access problem. That’s precisely why innovators are developing new ways to store and process data, all in an effort to get around the hard disk bottleneck. All of the approaches, in essence, minimize the bottleneck in order to improve response time.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing spreads a lot of data across many disks that can all be read simultaneously. Hadoop builds on the concept of distributed computing, but opens up the platform to handle any data set with any arbitrarily designed algorithm. To overcome the disk, the Hadoop community built Apache Spark, which provides a distributed data processing architecture, like Hadoop HDFS, that operates in-memory across commodity hardware.

Columnar Databases

Like distributed databases and Hadoop, columnar databases optimize data storage architecture in order to reduce the amount of data read off any one disk. It does this by grouping related attributes, or columns, together. The assumption is that most analytical queries only use a subset of columns, so you should only access data related to those specific columns. They also highly compress the data, further reducing the number of bits read off disk.

In-Memory Databases

In-memory databases take it to a whole new level by removing the disk from the equation altogether. It leverages the power of today’s processors to read and analyze data at a raw speed that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than reading data off the disk. In some cases, customers have experienced performance gains of 100,000 times faster. How?

– Compress the data with in-memory columnar data stores

– Move the data accessed most often into L1 caches on the chip

That’s why we are so bullish about in-memory and the SAP HANA platform for Big Data. That’s not to say disk solutions don’t have a role to play. But…at the core you want an in-memory system that can run algorithms where your data is. No moving the data to the algorithms, that doesn’t work in a Big Data world. Instead, move the core algorithms into the data system.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is the right tool for business analysts and data scientists to build predictive models from Big Data. First and foremost, it can analyze data inside SAP HANA and Apache Spark. There’s no need to transfer data out of these environments for processing. Rather, the SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics processing engine can run inside these tools – dramatically improving performance.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is also able to analyze exceptionally wide datasets. In fact, you can have up 15,000 columns in a dataset, while other tools support only a few hundred to 1,000 columns at most. This ensures that your predictive models provide the greatest level of accuracy possible.

Big Data is radically altering our world. It’s a game changer. For those who grab hold of it, you have an opportunity to propel your business forward – and the surest way forward is with SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics running on SAP HANA or Apache Spark. It is the best combination for building predictive models on Big Data, whether you’re a business analyst or data scientist.

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SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA – Let’s Start at the Beginning

amick.brown — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 17:41:34 +0000

by Ashith Bolar, Director AmBr Labs, Amick Brown

Every week at Amick Brown, we are questioned about HANA There is a lot of confusion in the market with the multiple options. As well, there are many questions about timing and business application. You have asked, so we will start a series of HANA articles to address your questions.

SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, shortened to SAP S/4HANA, is a big strategic play from SAP. Here is why you need to take heed.

The new SAP S/4HANA is supposed to replace the SAP Business Suite (formerly R/3) over the next few years. This announcement and the launch of the software lay a roadmap for SAP in the coming years.

What led to this launch?

SAP is a leader in ERP worldwide. However, in the recent past, a new trend is taking over in the business world. Cloud-based software services also known as Software-as-a-Service. SAP has SaaS components to it, but its main business model has been selling software the old way: software installed at the customers’ premise.

Other cloud companies have been slowly chipping away at SAP’s market share. And this is SAP’s answer.

Name

The R in R/3 stood for real-time. The S in the S/4 stands for Simple. This is the big idea. SAP is planning on simplifying the ERP system with this release.

Database

While SAP R/3 Business Suite ran on any database, S/4 runs exclusively on HANA. SAP has spent considerable financial resources and effort on building up the in-memory database over the past few years. SAP HANA has tremendous performance advantages compared to the older disk-based database solutions. This large-scale change has enabled SAP to dramatically simplify both the data-model as well as the user-experience.

One significant aspect of HANA is that it is an in-memory appliance. This means data-access times (disk read/writes) are not an issue anymore, allowing developers to focus more on business logic than performance. This lends itself to the other motivation for S/4 – simplicity.

The Cloud

SAP S/4HANA is mostly a movement of SAP’s premier software from customer premise to the cloud. However, on-premise solutions will still be available. SAP offers 3 options:

Public Cloud – Completely managed by SAP. Multi-tenancy shared by all public cloud customers
Private Cloud – Partially managed by SAP. Exclusive database per customer.
On-Premise – Software installed on client’s hardware. Client pays for user-licenses.

Software

SAP S/4HANA will allow customization to S/4HANA on the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). This means ABAP developers will get to continue to use their skills. If you don’t know OO, it is a good time to learn it.

Let’s admit it, SAP R/3 has not been known for its stellar user-experience. UI on SAP R/3 has been clunky, rigid and unwelcoming. But the S/4HANA user-interface will be based on SAP’s Fiori UX platform. SAP Fiori, launched earlier in 2014, gives the software a new look-and-feel. The fact it does not have licensing cost should make it attractive to customers with an existing SAP installation.

Conclusion

Co-founder, Hasso Plattner said “If this doesn’t work, we’re dead. Flat-out dead.” This may be just Hasso Plattner being the passionate visionary that he is. But this indeed is a huge launch from SAP, one whose initial roll out is expected to be 3-5 years, and customer transitions lasting more 10 years.

The story on S/4 HANA continues here. Watch this space and Follow Amick Brown on LinkedIn

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Reimagine Predictive Analytics for the Digital Enterprise

amick.brown — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 20:02:35 +0000

As part of a broad announcement made at SAPPHIRE NOW 2016, SAP announced a range of new features and capabilities in its analytics solutions portfolio. Because predictive capabilities play an important role in the portfolio, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the details of our innovations in both SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.

Innovations in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud

Predictive analytics capabilities have been added to the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud offering. Business users can use an intuitive graphical user interface to investigate business scenarios by leveraging powerful built-in algorithmic models. For example, users can perform financial projections with time series forecasts, automatically identify key influencers of operational performance, and determine factors impacting employee performance with guided machine discovery.

Innovations in SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics features that aim to help analysts easily deliver predictive insights across an enterprise’s business processes and applications are planned for availability in the near term.

Planned innovations include:

Automated predictive analysis of Big Data with native Spark modeling in Hadoop environments
Enhancements for SAP HANA include in-database social network analysis and embedding expert model chains
A new simplified user interface for the predictive factory and automated generation of segmented forecast models
Integration of third-party tools and external processes into predictive factory workflows
The ability to create and manage customized models that detect complex fraud patterns for the SAP Fraud Management analytic application

Learn more about what SAP Predictive Analytics has in store.

Upcoming Release of SAP Predictive Analytics

Watch the video about our upcoming release of SAP Predictive Analytics for more information.

Thank you to Pierre Leroux, Director, Predictive Analytics Product Marketing, SAP for writing this informative article.

AmickBrown.com

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Predictive Analytics and the Segment of One

amick.brown — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 12:33:02 +0000

by Richard Mooney, Product Manager, Advanced Analytics, SAP

One of the areas that SAP is investing heavily in is the idea of providing ‘extreme customer experience’ to the ‘Segment of One.’ What does this mean for analytics? Traditionally, large enterprises split customers into multiple segments based on customer attributes that were then used to identify and classify customers. These segments included their location, their current and potential spending, and which products and options they chose when they became a customer.

Marketers use these segments to determine which products they would market to which customers. Likewise, customer support applies different levels of service to each customer segment, and operations measures the profitability of each segment separately.

This is both highly frustrating to customers and incredibly inefficient use of resources.

Every customer is different. They feel frustrated when their individual needs aren’t met, and their expectations about how they’re treated as customers are rising.
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t take into account the emerging customer acquisition and support channels that provide the potential to reduce the cost of service and market much more effectively. This includes mobiles applications, social networks, and the internet of things.
Because the cost of customer communication is plummeting, customers are inundated with content. They’re choosing to delete, unfollow and unsubscribe from content that doesn’t speak to them.

These same trends are opportunities. Companies are collecting far more information than ever before and the technology exists to leverage this at scale. They no longer need to treat customers as being pure segments. They can market to them personally, understand their likes and preferences, and give them services, all of which turns them into fans and advocates.

So How Do We Use Data to Connect to the Segment of One?

Make the Segment of One a corporate mandate. Communicate and service each customer as if it were a personal connection.
Rethink how your digital front office assets (including digital marketing, customer service, and online) interact with customers to support this mandate.
Build a team of data scientists and data analysts to move from guesswork to data-driven decision-making.
Build your customer communication around their analysis and deploy their work into every front office application. Measure and monitor the return on investment (ROI) from each initiative.

If done properly, this will result in happier customers and higher net promoter scores. It also means that the data companies are collecting results in visible ROI, which improves their bottom line.

We would love to hear your thoughts on how the Segment of One will drive your data strategy. Contact us or comment here to let us know.

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