Spending a few days with IBM at the company’s Information on Demand conference comes with three guarantees: you’ll get a tightly run event (they’ve been doing this for a few years now after all); you’ll get plenty of news; and you’ll be hit with plenty of new Americanised terms such as the "templatizing" of business intelligence tools and the "operationalizing" of data analytics.
October 27, 2010
“Operationalizing” analytics: IBM’s new UK Cloud Computing Lab
Grazed from CWDN. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.
October 27, 2010
IBM Helps Resellers Serve the Midmarket
Grazed from ChannelPro SMB. Author: Cecilia Galvin and Jessica Mattison.
After an internal reorganization earlier this year, Andy Monshaw took the reins as IBM’s general manager of global midmarket business. This segment, says Monshaw, spends $156 billion on IT annually to run and grow their businesses. But that figure does not include PCs, printers, or other commodities; rather, it comprises “the core of IBM’s addressable market.” Monshaw talks about his plans to help resellers address this lucrative market.
ChannelPro-SMB: What are the requirements of midsize customers, and how should your partners address them?
October 26, 2010
What Comes Next in the Red-Hot Analytics Market?
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
October 26, 2010
Hadoop Gets a Boost – Cloudera Receives $25 Million Funding
Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Alex Williams.
Cloudera is announcing $25 million round in funding to further invest in product development and services to support its push into the enterprise.
It’s a clear sign that the Hadoop ecosystem is thriving as analytics become increasingly important and data more complex to manage.
The Series C funding is being led by Meritech Capital Partners. Current investors Accel Partners and Greylock Partners also participating. Cloudera has received $36 million in total funding…
October 26, 2010
Are You Ready, Insurance Execs? Gartner Identifies Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011
Grazed from Insurance and Technology. Author: Katherine Burger.
It has been interesting to see insurance companies wade into the exciting but still-untested waters of social media and mobile computing. While the industry’s inherent risk aversion is perhaps somewhat slowing the pace of these initiatives, neither do carriers seem to be taking their traditional wait-and-see approach to new technologies. It’s not so much, "Let’s watch how this plays out," as "What do we need to know and do to take advantage of this?"
October 26, 2010
Gladinet Adds Support For Openstack, Rackspace Cloud Files And Caringo Castor In Version 2.4
Grazed from Network Computing. Author: Mike Fratto.
October 24, 2010
Low-power computing promises to boost companies’ profits
Grazed from BBC. Author: Sharif Sakr.
The IMEC laboratory in Belgium is a surprising place. Nestled in the sleepy university town of Leuven, its low-key entrance gives little clue to the high-tech facility within.
The heart of the complex is a massive, dust-free ‘clean room’, staffed by carefully-wrapped technicians. Here, microchips are developed based on sophisticated and carefully guarded designs.
But unlike unlike consumer chips from Intel or AMD, IMEC’s microchips are not meant to be powerful – they are the exact opposite.
October 23, 2010
Backup For Cloud Apps
Grazed from Forbes. Author: David F. Carr.
Yes, I clicked the delete button. Yes, I regret it now. Yes, I belatedly realized why the Backupify service makes sense.
October 22, 2010
Amazon Web Services to make free cloud offer
Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.
"With the new free AWS [Amazon Web Services] usage tier, developers will be able to launch applications at no cost. If their new application spikes in popularity, it will seamlessly scale and run on AWS’s inexpensive, pay-as-you-go, standard pricing," the company said in a statement.
The single instance that will be used to run the applications will be a Linux Micro Instance. This is a low-powered 32 or 64-bit virtual machine with 613MB of memory, up to two EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) — which function as virtual processors — and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) storage only. An ECU provides the equivalent processor capacity of a 1-1.2GHz Opteron or Xeon processor.
October 22, 2010
Data quality practices ‘should evolve over time’
Grazed from Experian QAS. Author: James Glass.
Businesses should be looking to update their data quality practices over time to as their organisation continues to evolve, it has been suggested.
SmartData Collective blogger Jim Harris explained that companies often employ best practices when first starting data quality initiatives, but many fail to build on these standards.
He added that ensuring data quality requires continual work on the part of a company’s employees.