Data has always been important to business. While it wasn't long ago that businesses kept minimal information on people who bought their products, nowadays companies keep vast amounts of data. In the late 20th century, marketers began to take demographics seriously. It was hard to keep track of so much information without the help of computers.

Only large companies in the '60s and '70s could afford the research necessary to deliver real marketing insight. The marketers of yesteryear relied upon focus groups and expensive experiments to gauge consumer behavior in a controlled environment. Today even the smallest of companies can have access to a rich array of real-world data about their consumers' behavior and their consumers. The amount of data that is stored today dwarfs the data of only a few years ago by several orders of magnitude.

So what kind of information are businesses storing for marketing purposes? Some examples include:

- Demographic information — age, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation and various other individual characteristics.

When making a strategic cloud decision, organizations can follow either one of two ideologies: open or closed.

In the past, major software technologies have been widely accepted because an emerging market leader simplified the initial adoption.  After a technology comes of age, the industry spawns open alternatives that provide choice and flexibility, and the result is an open alternative that quickly gains traction and most often outstrips the capabilities of its proprietary predecessor.

After an organization invests significantly in a technology, the complexity and effort required steering a given workload onto a new system or platform is, in most cases, significant. Switching outlays, shifting to updated or new software/hardware platforms, and the accompanying risks may lead to the ubiquitousness of large, monolithic and complex ERP systems – reason not being that they offer the best value for an organization, but rather because shifting to anything else is simply – unthinkable.

There’s no denying that these are critical considerations today since a substantial number of organizations are making their first jump into the cloud and making preparations for the upsetting shift in how IT is delivered to both internal and external clientele. Early adopters are aware of the fact that the innovation brought about by open technologies can bring dramatic change, and hence are realizing how crucial it is to be able to chart their own destiny.

Companies have been collecting and analyzing data forever, pretty much.” So what’s really new here? What’s driving the data-analytics revolution and what does it mean for those that choose to postpone or ignore the pivotal role big-data is currently having on productivity and competition globally?

General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt explains it best when stating that “industrial companies are now in the information business—whether they like it or not.”  Likewise, digital data is now everywhere, it’s in every industry, in every economy, in every organization and according to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), this topic might once have concerned only a few data geeks, but big data is now relevant for leaders across every sector as well as consumers of products and services.

In light of the new data-driven global landscape and rapid technological advances, the question for senior leaders in companies now is how to integrate new capabilities into their operations and strategies—and position themselves globally where analytics can influence entire industries. An interesting discussion with six of theses senior leaders is covered in MGI’s article, “How companies are using big data and analytics,” providing us with a glimpse into a real-time decision making processes.

C# PROGRAMMING –MAIN DESIGN GOALS

C# is a popular programming language these days, and it was designed from inception to provide a simple, clean, general purpose programming language for those intending to work within the confines of Microsoft’s .NET framework.  Since then, it has been approved as one of the standard languages by both ECMA and ISO, making C# programming an essential tool in every programmers’ kit.

Different languages have different uses and specialties, and C# was designed for programmers to be able to use it to create different components for use in software that would be deployed and distributed en masse, to live use environments.  This means that designers had to really put an emphasis on making the actual source code extremely compatible and portable.  Those already familiar with C or C++ should definitely notice this emphasis.

Another particular point of emphasis during design was focus on internationalization of the language; it was intended from inception to be available all over the world, and to see all sorts of different implementations based on variance in regional programming technique.  The resultant use should help the language develop sophistication as it is refined throughout different versions.