Open Source R Language May Supercharge BI

Analyzing very large data sets, like those generate by major direct commerce merchants -- sometimes known as "Big Data" --  has traditionally posed significant programming challenges. This led to the development of the R programming language in the early 90s by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (known as "R" and "R"), two academics at the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, R has since become the language of choice for large-scale analystic statistical analysis among many students, scientists, programmers and data managers.

"R is a GNU project similar to the S statistical programming language and environment, which is often the vehicle of choice for analytic statistics," notes Herman Mehling in Open Source R Language Could Revolutionize Business Intelligence on the eCRMGuide.com. "R provides an open source route to S and adds some unique capabilities. One of R's greatest strengths is the ease with which it can create well-designed publication-quality plots with mathematical symbols and formulae."

R has been brought to the business world by vendors like SAS, Netezza, Revolution Analytics and IBM, which acquired SPSS, the most active of which has been Revolution Analytics, founded by Norman Nie, who co-invented the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), which marked the beginning of analytic and predictive statistical software.

Notes Mehling: "Earlier this month, Revolution Analytics introduced 'Big Data' analysis to its Revolution R Enterprise software, taking R to what it claims are unprecedented levels of capacity and performance for analyzing very large data sets. The company says R users will be able to process, visualize and model terabyte-class data sets in a fraction of the time of legacy products, without the need for expensive or specialized hardware.

"This Big Data scalability will help R transition from a research and prototyping tool to a production-ready platform for enterprise applications such as quantitative finance and risk management, social media, bioinformatics and telecommunications data analysis, said Nie."

A new version of Revolution R Enterprise introduces an add-on package called RevoScaleR that provides a new framework for fast and efficient multi-core processing of large data sets, a capability that Revolution Analytics claims sets it apart from other vendors.

Revolution R Enterprise works with Hadoop, NoSQL databases, relational databases and data warehouses.

Revolution Analytics also offers inside-R.org for the open source R statistics community. 

Netezza TwinFin DWH Appliance
Mehling reports that "Netezza, a maker of data warehouse, analytic and monitoring appliances, recently announced its TwinFin data warehousing appliance, which integrates with R. The new appliance includes Netezza's i-Class analytics capabilities and a new release of Netezza Performance Software.

"The vendor says its i-Class technology provides extensions for the development and execution of advanced analytics, including support for Java, C/C++, Fortran, Python, MapReduce, Hadoop, SAS and R. The i-Class technology eliminates the need to move data into specialized systems for advanced analytics, accelerating application performance and simplifying their deployment.

"Recently, Kelley Blue Book selected the Netezza warehouse appliance to gain deeper insights into advertising performance and site traffic, and to increase customer satisfaction and advertising revenue. kbb.com, with more than 18 million monthly visits, dramatically reduced the amount of time it took to process data for a variety of purposes, said Dan Ingle, vice president of analytic insights at Kelley Blue Book," reports Mehling.

Vortx Buys AspDotNetStorefont

Vortx, Inc., an eCommerce company based in Ashland, OR, has completed the acquisition of AspDotNetStorefront, a division of Discovery Productions, Inc. and a leading eCommerce solution on the MS Dynamics/AX platform. AspDotNetStorefront is used by more than 10,000 online retailers and 6,000 eCommerce developers and partners.

"To say we are pleased with the acquisition would be a massive understatement," says Dana Greaves, Vortx founder and CEO. "Acquiring one of the leading .NET-based e-commerce platforms enables us to more quickly bring our current products, like our mobile commerce platform and dozens of other add-ons and service offerings, to online storeowners and the strategic partnerships we already serve. It's the perfect marriage of synergies, and a natural step in our rather dramatic growth in recent years."

Says Robert Anderson, President and CEO of Discovery Productions, "We have spent more than 10 years and millions of dollars building one of the most respected platforms in the business. Vortx has been one of our most successful partners and is very well revered within the e-commerce community. I couldn't be happier with this fit."

Plans for the next six months include multi-store enhancements, mobile, search traffic, and backoffice integration features. "This platform will quickly become known for its community-based approach to providing expertise, code, and a marketplace of plug-ins, all embraced by a blanket of high-quality service,"says Jo Benson, COO at Vortx.

Mixed Picture on Call Center Outsourcing

There are an estimated 60,000 people in the US doing call center work from home, NPR Reports. That number, points out Marty Lariviere in The Operations Room, is not up much from a few years ago, however, even though it is getting more expensive to operate in India ("US matches Indian outsourcing costs" - Financial Times). So the story here is that Americans are obviously willing to do call center work at home in this economy, as the cost of outsourcing to India moves upward and wages for American homeworkers are more competitive. But there is no overall gain in this sector, with US-based companies cutting expenses overall.

eComm Platform Venda Bundles Fulfillment PRO Logistics

Venda, a major on-demand eCommerce provider, now offers Venda Fulfillment Precision Robotic Optimization (PRO) logistics™ powered by Quiet Logistics. By joining two leading providers at the technology, marketing and business service levels, this new solution will allow both companies to seek new growth opportunities that will help users reduce costs and complexity while improving speed and accuracy.

Venda Fulfillment PRO Logistics, the industry’s first robotic warehousing and fulfillment solution, leverages the same scalable onDemand model as does Venda to deliver end-to-end eCommerce and fulfillment. As the latest addition to the Venda eCommerce eCosystem, Fulfillment PRO takes much of the risk, guesswork, errors and costs out of this critical element of eCommerce success.

Powered by Quiet Logistics, Venda Fulfillment PRO delivers the speed and accuracy of robotic fulfillment technology from Kiva, previously available only to large firms, to any organization running the Venda Enterprise eCommerce platform. Fulfillment PRO also offers the F.A.S.T. ™ Guarantee (Flexible, Accurate, Speedy and Trustworthy), ensuring orders are delivered on time and error-free.

Key benefits:

• Customers will have the ability to track changes in product types, product velocities, order prioritization and other operational realities that is not possible with traditional sorting equipment.
• Every item at each physical process point (receiving, put away, replenishment, picking, shipping and inventory audit) is verified by bar code scanning. 
• Simultaneous picking and replenishment can proceed at the same time with full productivity, allowing reduced days-on-hand of inventory.
• High Reliability of SaaS eCommerce and SaaS Fulfillment with parallel equipment and no single point of failure for zero downtime in a 24/7 operation. 

The integrated service will be available in both the U.S. and in Europe, with local facilities and support.

“We are investing together in this new solution because the eCommerce industry is at an inflection point,” said Greg Cronin, Vice Chairman and EVP of Quiet Logistics. “Together, Venda and Quiet Logistics are collaborating at a fundamental level in both integration and product development, allowing us to rapidly deliver high quality, reliable solutions that will enable our customers to realize increased economic benefits from our combined solution.”

About Venda
Venda delivers on-demand eCommerce to some of the world's leading retailers and manufacturers, including Tesco, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Superdrug, JVC, Urban Outfitters, Conde Nast and Jimmy Choo.  Multi-lingual and multi-currency capable, Venda has both B2B and B2C solutions.. The company has offices in New York, London and Bangkok.

Three Reasons To Consider Outsourcing Fulfillment

Strategic marketers are always focusing on maintaining a competitive edge. One way they’re doing this is by considering outsourced fulfillment operations with third-party providers. Ronnie Johnson, COO at Fifth Gear, a leading provider of outsourced business and technology services for over 100 direct retailers, specialty retailers and manufacturers of consumer products, has written an article on 3 Reasons to Outsource Fulfillment, published by ROI. It's worth a look. If you've never given this option serious attention, you should, and even if you have, it's worth revisiting... (it may not be a good fit, but it should be re-evaluated every so often, just to be sure: your company keeps changing, the third-party environment keeps changing...heck, everything keeps changing!)

Fifth Gear Extends HCM Contract

Fifth Gear, Indianapolis, IN, has announced a three-year extension of its relationship with Hallmark Custom Marketing (HCM) supporting Hallmark’s UNICEF partnership through order fulfillment and customer contact center services (a portion of every order generates revenue for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF).

As a client of Fifth Gear, HCM provides customers with accurate, timely delivery and customer service for the UNICEF product line. Hallmark became the exclusive creator, manufacturer and distributor for all UNICEF greeting cards sold in the United States in 2006.

Fith Gear is a leading provider of outsourced business and technology services for over 100 direct retailers, specialty retailers and manufacturers of consumer products, serving as a single source partner to drive revenue growth and improve operational efficiencies. Through its online marketplace, LastandFinal.com, Fifth Gear is also building a multi-category online discount retailer of new, "closeout" and "excess stock" specialty merchandise.

Sanderson's StoreVision Unifies Stock Reporting

Toys N Tuck in the UK has upgraded its retail stock systems platform to StoreVision from Sanderson, a comprehensive point of sale and back office retail management solution, to give it the ability to review stock levels for all stores and the warehouse on a single EPoS platform, so stock queries can be resolved immediately, without the need to call around each site.

Real-time stock visibility not only improves efficiency for Toys N Tuck, but also enables faster response and better service for its customers. “We can pinpoint information to answer customer queries straight away: it’s easier for the staff and means they provide a better service,” says David Dadswell, founder and MD.

With visibility comes the confidence in stock accuracy and, in turn, sales data accuracy.

Dadswell has some sound advice for others: “Decide what you want from the system - that will determine what you put into it. Having planned this properly at the outset, I know that I can now drill down into data by supplier, by store, by department within that store, by a time period... whatever parameters I require. You must prepare properly if you really want to gain the maximum value from the extensive data the system can offer.”

The new-found confidence in this data is enabling Toys N Tuck to make better decisions more quickly, which is crucial in such a fast-moving sector. “The scope and range of reports is fantastic, and it is highly flexible. I can see exactly which areas of a store are producing the most profit. There is so much useful functionality that it goes beyond what we require now, but knowing we can tap into that in future is very important to us.”

Indeed, StoreVision enables Toys N Tuck to react quickly to demand, spot trends and ensure purchase ordering mirrors that demand. “We are able to maximise the use of cash flow and direct it to the right areas,” confirms Dadswell. “The toy industry is quite different to other retail sectors because you have to order so far in advance, but with StoreVision we know we have the control we need. We have all the critical data to hand.”