Whether you are looking for a luxury hotel on a secluded beach or a place to stay in midtown Manhattan that won’t break the bank, the process of sorting through options and booking online can seem pretty straightforward. But behind most travel websites today is a complex data engine that pays close attention to what ...

As big data and machine learning tools become essential for modern business, the primary goal is no longer predicting the likelihood of making a sale. It’s now a matter of increasing the likelihood that a customer will buy. This key distinction forms the essential thesis behind former Columbia University Professor Eric Siegel’s book, “Predictive Analytics: ...

The Apache Spark community has been wrestling with a wide range of big data challenges in information technology, and Databricks Inc. (which was founded by Spark’s creators), is taking steps to address the enterprise need for machine learning and speedier data processing. “Rather than giving people the fish, you give them the tools to fish,” ...

Digital transformation became a hot topic nearly three years ago as the focus on it moved from the halls of Silicon Valley companies to the boardrooms of firms such as General Electric Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Ford Motor Co. Non-tech companies began to consider how to get products to be more like services, how to ...

Surf Airlines Inc., known as Surf Air, is gaining liftoff for a business model attempting success in one of the most capital-intensive, cutthroat enterprises there is: airlines. The California-based company, founded in 2013, uses the recurring revenue from monthly memberships to compete with commercial carriers through a completely different approach. And as the fledgling airline has ...

Is Caterpillar Inc. becoming a platform or software services company? While some of its executives maintain that the mission is still to sell big iron, the company’s visible presence at the Zuora Subscribed event in June highlights a continued push to provide construction and mining customers with new digital tools. “There’s a lot of software ...

As the shopping experience has moved to the mobile platform, retailers around the globe are confronting a new reality: technology has shifted the balance of power. More often than not, consumers have more information than store personnel these days, knowledgeable about everything from competitor pricing to inventory supply. And that’s forcing many retailers to make ...

A cornerstone of Infor Inc.’s business strategy is micro-verticals, a focus on industry-specific software that can provide unique solutions for a baker versus a brewer. When the enterprise software provider bought enterprise resource planning rival Lawson six years ago, it forced one system integrator, Avaap Inc., to make a risky bet that Infor’s strategy would ...

When you own a set of companies that offers customer solutions to diverse industries, such as construction, mining, oil and gas, agriculture, and power, you can count on having plenty of competition. For the Zahid Group, this meant reaching out to Infor Inc. for scalable applications critical to the heavy equipment industry with the goal ...

When the investment arm of Koch Industries Inc. paid $2.5 billion for a major stake in Infor Inc., the move was seen as another “traditional company goes digital” story. The extent of Koch’s interest in Infor became clearer today when it was announced that the business applications provider will implement CloudSuite — a benchmark suite for ...