July 12, 2015
Cloud Computing: Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Service Gets a Power Boost
Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.
An updated version of Microsoft’s Power BI service will be released July 24, the company announced Friday. The goal of the updated service is to enable business users to benefit from business intelligence and analytics without requiring sophisticated help from analysts, data scientists, or other tech staff.
The new set of business-intelligence tools will replace Microsoft’s current Power BI for Office 365 service. Also available on July 24 will be Power BI Desktop — formerly known as Power BI Designer.
Enhancements to the Power BI Desktop include new visualizations; visualization formatting; more source support to include Zendesk, Intuit Quickbooks Online and AppFigures, among others; and direct connection to SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models for data exploration…
Last month, global software giant SAP SE announced that its Predictive Analytics Software has been upgraded to include integration for big data and Internet of Things (IoT) analytics. The stronger integration of SAP HANA analytics with IoT serves the increasing number of customers that apply analytics to the enormous amount of data generated in IoT applications. From an analytics standpoint, customers will now be able to gain insights into big data derived from IoT. On the other hand, IoT enterprises will be able to gain analytical insights that were insofar not available as easily.
Anyone who has ever met an Oracle ORCL 0.45% sales person knows from a high-pressure sale. For these people much of their rich compensation comes in bonuses earned when they hit particular quota numbers. So it’s not at all surprising that Oracle, now all-in on cloud computing, is telling its sales people to push cloud and structuring incentives so that cloud sales are richly rewarded while sales of traditional on-premises software licenses, not so much.
While the rest of the tech media marvelled at the world’s first seven nanometre chips unveiled by IBM earlier this week, the Armonk giant has quietly pushed out a couple of impressive cloud announcements alongside it. IBM – who, let us not forget, wants to be seen as a cloud-first organisation – has announced the availability of NVIDIA Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators on bare metal cloud servers. In other words, it provides supercomputing powers to the SoftLayer cloud without the need for companies to expand their existing infrastructure.
An alliance led by IBM Research (NYSE:IBM) today announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors. The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches — transistors — on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft.
Red Hat (RHT) launched its global Certified Cloud and Service Provider program this week, which replaces the company’s existing Certified Cloud Provider Program. The new program is designed to expand the company’s cloud ecosystem to provide support for additional distributors, managed service providers and partners selling hybrid cloud-centric services. Red Hat said the Certified Cloud and Service Provider program would allow cloud providers to grow their private cloud solutions with Linux-based infrastructure and platform as service solutions, according to the announcement.
Cloud vendor DigitalOcean today announced that it has raised $83 million in a Series B round of funding led by Access Industries and with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz. The new funding, according to Ben Uretsky, co-founder and CEO of DigitalOcean, will help finance his company’s growth, buying new servers and investing in the facilities and assets that are needed to move the company forward.