Lots of discussions about complex topics start with the premise that there are two types of people. That's where Symantec's Chief Technology Officer Hugh Thompson began his discussion on the challenges facing the security industry. He began his entertaining security keynote at this year's CeBIT event in Sydney telling the story of a bird that flew into a commercial aircraft as the plane was being loaded by ground staff. It was trapped in the passenger cabin, only becoming known when the trans-Atlantic flight was in the air. The reactions to the story are indicative, he said, about differing attitudes to security risks.

In the United States, one of the biggest retail successes of the mid 20th century was Sears. The retailer created a massive business, that in today's dollars was doing twice as much business as Amazon is currently turning over. And it was built on one critical element - knowing the customer. Sears was eventually swamped by Walmart and others and today we're seeing online retailers doing the same. Looking back at the past can be a great way to learn how to succeed in the future.

The NFL, in the United States, now has RFID tracking in every player's shoulder pads and in the balls used at every match. Delivered by Zebra Technologies, the solution brings data and analysis to players, coaches and fans. The sensor, which is small, light and lasts a year is at the core of the solution.

Peter Gray leads Dimension Data's technology practice and is heavily involved in the company's sponsorship with the Tour de France. Sport is now an industry that depends on technology and data.

Splunk's new Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring provides end-to-end security, operational and cost management insights on AWS. It delivers an analytics-based approach to cloud monitoring and provides end-to-end visibility into a customer’s AWS infrastructure, delivering real-time awareness of performance, health, configuration, security and infrastructure spend.

Innovation is not easy. It involves experimentation, taking risks and investing resources in projects that may not deliver the outcomes you want. Optimizely takes a data driven approach to testing multiple scenarios so you can make better decisions about what's best for your business. I spoke with their new managing director for ANZ, Dan Ross, about their Australian launch and the opening of Australian offices in Melbourne and Sydney and how decision making is not about hippos.

At last week's SplunkLive! event, the company's global field leader for IT markets, Johnathon Cervelli opened the event, saying the company has continued to grow their business with a focus on more than security analytics although this continues to be an area the company is working on. Cervelli says companies are using data, not just to secure their businesses, but to also make more sense of changing environments as businesses move to an increasingly hybrid world.

A company that can’t understand its data is flying blind. That’s why so many businesses are willing to pay a premium for business analytics experts to make sense of it, and the Social Media & Google Analytics Certification Bundle can get you started on this career path.

The web is (arguably) more than a place for cat videos. It’s actually a powerful tool for businesses to reach their customers, which is why so many companies are looking for great online marketing pros.

Regardless of your experience, you can start your own web marketing career with the Marketing Analytics Mastery Bundle, on sale for only $50.87 AUD .

In the world of the web, though, building something isn’t enough. To maximise traffic and sales, you need to know how draw users in and keep their interest, which is exactly what you’ll learn with the Growth Hacker Mastery Bundle, offered at more than 90% off the retail price for Lifehacker readers.

Google has teamed up with GitHub to add a new open dataset on Google BigQuery, a low cost analytics data warehouse service in the cloud, so that users can get a snapshot of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories. This will bring new possibilities for data analytics to BigQuery. Here's what you need to know.

Big data is not a new concept. It has been used in business for decades. The reason it's becoming a buzz word now is because companies are beginning to understand that if they capture all the data that is coming into their business, they can apply analytics and get significant value from it.

Australian data analytics professionals are making a mint with an annual median salary of $130,000. For those with big data and cloud analytics skills, that figure could be as high as $200,000. But according to a recent survey, most companies that hire data analytics workers are not getting the bang for their buck.

HP has ramped up efforts in the open source big data and analytics space, adding extensive support to open source technologies in the latest release of its HP Vertica analytics engine. Here's what you need to know.

Analytics and big data are a potentially lucrative career path, but what should you do to ensure that you keep one of those roles? Here are some simple tips to make sure you're indispensable.

While women sitting on company boards remains a much-discussed topic, there is something new waiting to take a seat at the table: artificial intelligence, computers with company voting rights.

Windows: Tableau is a nifty tool for converting data from Excel and other sources into visualisations. Version 9.0 has been in beta testing since late last year, and the release version is about to arrive.

When the phrase "Internet of things" gets bandied about, it's usually taken to refer to collecting data from sensors, whether those are on consumer devices like fridges or workplace devices like temperature controls. But is that too limited a view to adopt?

Big data remains a hot topic, and that means finding and hiring qualified data scientists is trickier than ever. Here are some tactics you can use to help fill the gap.