If you haven’t yet gotten into mapping your data, now might be a good time to take a closer look at the technologies available. While maps have been around for thousands of years, the digital kind are a more recent innovation and more of a communications language, to visually display content and get context. Plus, they are universally recognized by everyone.

In this article for ITworld and the accompanying slideshow of maps, I talk about six trends that businesses can capitalize on with using these tools.

Thanks to Apache Hadoop and other data-analytics technologies, the international retailer Sears has managed to not only transform its IT operations, but also decommission some of its mainframe computers. The company has been so successful with this project that it has spun off the group responsible into a separate company that is now selling its services to others. Call this one of the bigger proof-points of using Hadoop in the enterprise.

Read the rest of my article on Sears at StampedeCon here on Slashdot and see the software side of Sears.

In my post on geofencing, I mentioned efforts by a number of retailers to make use of location-based information. There is another perspective on location, that of the provider of the geospatial databases that drive many of the location-aware mobile apps that are being developed. Redlands, Calif.-based ESRI has been one of the leaders in this space. I spoke to two of their key managers about how they work with developers and how their business is changing.

“We have a forty year history of doing location analytics very well,” said Simon Thompson, their Director of Commercial Solutions. “We now offer a wide range of things ranging from sentiment hot spot analysis of social media check-ins to tracking people’s behaviors and matching them up with demographic predictions.”

Location-awareness has gone through an evolution over the past several years, starting with the realization that most of us don’t want to install multiple location apps on our smartphones. “Consumers want valuable insight delivered to them as part of their existing browsing experience,” Thompson said. ESRI can now use anonymous tracking cookies inside the mobile browsers to see where these mobile phones travel and differentiate patterns based on time of day or particular geographies. “This is a much broader segment than just those who check in on Foursquare,” he said. “Location has become an essential data source in a wide variety of apps.”

At its start, ESRI built their mapping APIs for a professional or geo-centric audience, and has lately evolved into a providing a more accessible developer experience. “We wanted to simplify things for the developer who maybe wanted to dip their toe into the shallow end of the pool first and try out location awareness,” said Bronwyn Agrios, ESRI’s Mobile Business Development Manager. Things seem to be working for them: their sales are booming. They are quickly signing up retailer customers and VARs, making this market segment their biggest growth area. “We have most of the big commercial retail chains as customers,” said Thompson.

So are there any special skills needed to take advantage of ESRI’s location APIs? Not really. “Any mobile developer can easily become a location-aware developer,” said Agrios.

One example of an IT-related retail partner of ESRI’s is Aisle411, a service that allows shoppers of more than 12,000 retail stores to pinpoint a particular product on a shelf via an interior map of the store. Say you are trying to find that special sponge but haven’t a clue. You can bring up their app on your smartphone, have it go to the store map of the particular Walgreen’s you are shopping, and it will direct you from your current location to the appropriate aisle. Think of it as an indoor GPS.

Nathan Pettyjohn is their CEO and very happy working with ESRI, who helped with supplying some of the location data for their app. “Retailers have invested billions in their store assets, but there is a big hole in digitizing that asset so that shoppers can navigate their store. What we are trying to do is combine search and location intelligence, to trigger unique shopping experiences.” He mentions that people who use his app convert into actual buyers 93% of the time, a rate that is much higher than the average store browser who uses the old fashioned wander-and-hunt to find items. “ESRI has made it really easy to integrate their mapping interface to set up geo targets and triggers. A developer could try to create this on their own, but there are so many complexities about battery drain and different mobile OS,” he said.

Some might complain that there is too much data in ESRI’s databases. “It can be overwhelming initially, but that is a double-edged sword: it is also very rich too,” said Thompson. It might be time to find your way to their website and take a closer look at what they can offer.

Monsanto is more infamous for growing its genetically modified corn than its software, but a series of corporate acquisitions and a new emphasis on IT solutions has made it a firm that acts more like an innovative IT vendor than an agribusiness giant, and is definitely worth watching. They are a good example of how agribusiness companies are getting interested in Big Data, as we wrote about last year

At a presentation at a downtown St. Louis tech incubator entitled, “The Role of IT in Modern Agriculture,” Jim McCarter reviewed where the agribusiness giant is going with its IT efforts to an audience of entrepreneurs and civic leaders. McCarter is the Entrepreneur in Residence for Monsanto and has worked there less than two years. Before he came there, he ran his own biotech startup where he developed pest control molecules. He is also is a genetics professor at Washington University.

One of their goals is to produce crops that can double their yields by 2030. This focus on productivity and sustainable agriculture pervades the company. “IT is becoming increasingly central to what we do, and we are integrating IT into all aspects of our business now,” he said.

“Monsanto has become a data-driven culture.” The proof is how much data they now keep track of. (See the chart below.) One issue is that Monsanto is involved in efforts that generate huge amounts of bits: there are its genomic efforts, which have gotten public attention to be sure. But there are also phenotypes of millions of plant DNA structures that describe the various biological properties of each plant, and remote sensing photographic imagery of crop fields. All told they have several tens of petabytes that need storage and analysis, and it is doubling about every 16 months too. As a result, Monsanto has become a big user of Hadoop and H Base and other Big Data tools to manage all this data.

The company is headquartered in St. Louis with more than 21,000 employees in 500 different locations around the globe. About 5,000 of them are engaged in basic research and development, and the company is investing about $1.4 billion in R&D each year. While isn’t at the levels of an IBM or Microsoft, it is an impressive figure for a company that just a few years ago didn’t have many IT-related employees.

To give you some perspective, a quick search of job openings on Monsanto’s website this week shows 24 positions involving Big Data, including one for an IT Commercial Delivery Lead for Global Infrastructure that could have been lifted right from the pages of a bank or insurance company’s career pages. Another example is two current openings on Dice for Hadoop developers.

This isn’t the only iPad use case for Monsanto. They have deployed more than 1,500 of them to their field support staff to keep them in front of growers and spend less time on administrative work. The company also has several other IT-based initiatives such as FarmCare, to use mobile phone alerts about real-time weather threats to farmers, and North Star, a global supply chain transportation management system that has saved millions of dollars in overhead costs.

Monsanto isn’t trying to go at this alone. There have other IT collaborations going on, and are partnering up in specialized areas such as remote imaging, high performance computing and computational biology. This tracks with what other large multinational firms are doing as they capture more data and try to use it as part of their basic business decision-making.

Another way the company has grown over the last several years is through acquisitions. Last year they purchased Precision Planting. That company has been applying software to farming techniques and will form the first of Monsanto’s efforts in what it calls Integrated Farming Systems and its FieldScripts software. (See descriptive illustration below.) It is presently in beta and runs on an iPad that connects to the tractor planter controls. “Just like Amazon has its recommendation engine for what book to buy, we will have our recommendations of what and how a grower should plant a particular crop,” said McCarter. “All fields aren’t uniform and shouldn’t be planted uniformly either,” he said. The software will look at two different crops and different planting densities as a farmer is sowing his crop, taking into account geospatial data and other analytics about crop performance. “Farmers are very data driven,” said Erich Hochmuth, the data analysis architecture lead for Monsanto. “And when they hear that they can improve their crop yields by anywhere from five to ten bushels per acre, that gets their attention. That can add up, and can be a big motivation for farmers to adopt our technology.”

Are you looking to be on the cutting edge of Big Data? How would you like to test and refine your Hadoop application to see if it can handle the largest known cluster? Then you might be interested in what EMC’s Greenplum unit is doing in its Las Vegas data center, where anyone can make use of their facility for free. Yes, you read that correctly. It has been in operation for less than a year, and is already getting rave reviews from more than a dozen different customers from all over the world.

I interviewed several customers of the cluster for a recent story in ITworld here.