Apache Kafka™ is a massively scalable publish and subscribe messaging system. Originally developed by LinkedIn and open sourced in 2011, it is horizontally scalable, fault tolerant and extremely fast. In the last few years its popularity has grown rapidly, and it now provides critical data pipelines for a huge array of companies including internet giants such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest, Uber, PayPal and AirBnB. So, when the innovative and award winning ISP Exa Networks approached us to help deliver a live analytics solution that would consume, analyse and visualise over 100 million messages a day (up to 6.5…

The guiding principal when designing any dashboard should be to ensure your users understand key information at a glance. Ideally, a user taking their first look at your dashboard should be able to understand key information within a few seconds. Achieving this is not rocket science, simply applying a few simple principles to your decision making will transform your dashboards.   First off, make sure your dashboard is focused. If I’m looking at a dashboard that contains information for five different roles in the organisation, I need to filter out or navigate round views for all the others to get…

Speak to pretty much any application vendor whose been around for some time and they’ll likely tell you their resources are focused heavily on modernization. Understandable, given how rapidly our industry has been changing over the last few years, and the constant barrage of social chatter around cloud, mobility and SaaS. Yet look at any recent survey of CIO investment priorities and you’ll find modernization of enterprise applications is near the bottom. We think this is because disruptive change within industry is not being driven by change to core business applications (which is often very expensive and presents huge risk),…

Workflow is a key component for any legal practice – increasing efficiencies, improving customer service and coping with evolving regulatory requirements – which is why legal case management has always been a key focus area for software developers. The market leader in legal case management is Lexis® Visualfiles from LexisNexis. The Visualfiles “toolkit” allows organisations to expand the standard solution, adding their own entities and workflows to match any business requirement, automating even the most complex processes. Today, Visualfiles is the most widely used case and matter management system in the UK with more than 25,000 registered users in firms…