Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Steve Lohr.

IBM delivered a quarterly performance that shows the steady headway it is making in new businesses led by cloud computing and data-analysis software, like its Watson artificial intelligence technology. But the company’s transformation remains very much a work in progress. The erosion of some of its hardware and software products continues to be a drag on growth and profits, overshadowing the gains in the new fields.

IBM on Monday reported a 21 percent decline in net profit from continuing operations, to $2.3 billion in the first quarter that ended March 31. Its operating earnings per share fell 19 percent, to $2.35 a share, though that was above the average estimate of Wall Street analysts of $2.09 a share, as complied by Thomson Reuters...

Grazed from BlueData

BlueData, provider of the leading infrastructure software platform for Big Data, today announced the spring release for the BlueData EPIC software platform. With this new product release, available immediately, BlueData introduces several new enhancements to provide enterprise-class security and quality of service (QoS) for multi-tenant Big Data deployments. In addition, BlueData continues to add support for new applications and frameworks to provide a simple, flexible, and extensible Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) environment on-premises.

Complexity remains a major barrier to adoption for Big Data technologies like Hadoop and Spark. BlueData's software innovations make it easy to deploy Big Data infrastructure and applications, leveraging Docker containers to provide a self-service BDaaS experience on-premises together with the highest levels of security and performance for Big Data analytics in the enterprise.

Grazed from Gadgets360. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon.com's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, said that more than 1,000 databases have been moved to the AWS cloud by customers since the beginning of the year. The AWS Data Migration Service, which allows migration of databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL from on-premises data centres to AWS, is now available to all customers, the company said on Tuesday.

Amazon Web Services said that Expedia, Pegasystems, and Thomas Publishing are among many of the customers who have moved on-premises databases to Amazon Aurora and other Amazon RDS engines. Cloud computing is the fastest growing business for Amazon, which until recently was mostly known as an online marketplace...

Read more from the source @ http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/amazon-web-services-says-over-1000-databases-moved-to-cloud-since-january-1-814460

Grazed from Talend

Talend, a global leader in big data integration software, today released a new version of its Talend Integration Cloud , a secure, Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solution designed to help companies more easily manage on-premises, cloud and hybrid integration workloads in their AWS environments. Available now, the new release allows IT organizations to execute big data and data integration projects running on AWS Redshift or AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) with fewer resources and at a reduced cost. The updated Talend Integration Cloud solution also enables developers and architects to bring native Spark processing capabilities into an iPaaS solution in order to empower departments across the enterprise with real-time analytics.

The continued growth of big data, the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), and expanding corporate data lakes is driving companies to move an increasing percentage of data processing to the cloud. In fact, Gartner expects that enterprise iPaaS will continue to grow at a double-digit rate over the next five years. Talend Integration Cloud delivers the fast, scalable, elastic, and secure technology businesses need to keep pace with their growing stores of data and transform that information into real-time insight.

Grazed from Altiscale, Inc.

Altiscale, Inc., the leading provider of Big Data-as-a-Service, today introduced a new solution, the Altiscale Insight Cloud, a self-service analytics solution for Big Data. The Altiscale Insight Cloud supplies the critical missing bridge between Big Data and the business user -- a rapidly queried data lake that enables business analysts to get critical answers all by themselves, while using familiar business intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft Excel.

The Altiscale Insight Cloud powers interactive SQL queries, dynamic visualizations, real-time dashboards, and other reporting and analytics capabilities. As a high-performance, self-service analytics solution, the Altiscale Insight Cloud replaces more complex, expensive alternatives that require heavy IT involvement, allowing Big Data to be harnessed more broadly and quickly throughout the organization and improving the speed and size of business impact. 

Grazed from theInquirer. Author: Daniel Robinson.

In an unexpected move, Microsoft has announced that it is prepping a version of SQL Server for Linux systems. The company has provided public preview releases of SQL Server 2016 since May last year, and the release candidate version was last updated at the start of this month. Microsoft will now herald the arrival of SQL Server 2016 with a Data Driven event in New York on 10 March culminating in general availability of the platform later this year.

However, Microsoft has announced that it will also bring SQL Server to Linux, starting with the core relational database capabilities currently available in the private preview release and full availability slated for the middle of 2017. Bringing SQL Server to Linux will enable Microsoft to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premise and cloud, according to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group...

Grazed from Qubole.

Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company, today announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C financing, bringing its total funding to $50 million. IVP led the financing and General Partner Somesh Dash will join the Qubole board of directors. Existing investors CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners invested additional capital into the company as part of the financing.

Qubole will use this funding to expand the availability of Qubole Data Service (QDS), a self-service platform for big data analytics, and to integrate new data engines so customers can choose the right tool for their data analytics needs. Qubole has seen great traction in a number of industries, with customers including Datalogix (Oracle), BloomReach, Pinterest, TubeMogul and Fanatics. The company plans to target several new verticals, including Internet of Things (IoT), life sciences and retail. Additionally, the company will target larger enterprises that are accelerating their usage of the cloud. It will also expand its customer acquisition efforts in the APAC and EU regions.

Grazed from INNDaily. Author: Morag McGreevey.

Sometimes it seems like every other business is a cloud-based company. This internet-based computing service has entirely transformed the way information is processed, organized, stored and shared. Indeed, it seems almost impossible to separate the explosion of big data from cloud computing.

However, the rapid transition from old school data management to the highly efficient data centers driving today’s markets has created a need for cybersecurity solutions. With sensitive personal information, healthcare records and financial records being managed by these systems, cloud security has emerged as a vital aspect of protecting this data. As a result, cloud computing, cybersecurity and big data investment have formed an important nexus in the tech space...

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Kalev Leetrau.

Science Magazine’s first issue of 2016 includes a discussion chronicling how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is re-exploring how it manages funding for the many biomedical database products it supports. In particular, the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is expected to close out its funding of the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) database, one of the oldest genomic databases that has run continuously for 50 years. What does this mean for the future of scientific big data hosting?

Today the NIH spends more than $110 million a year on its largest 50 databases, excluding those hosted by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). OMIM, supported by NHGRI, costs $2.1 million a year and draws more than 300,000 unique users a month and 23 million page views a year, while the Gene Ontology Consortium draws 36,000 users a month at a cost of $3.7 million a year...