MIT next spring will launch a pilot of MITx online-only courses geared to reach prospective learners around the world. And, the university plans to open source the underlying technology coursework infrastructure for use by other educational institutions. Read More »
Bio:Barb has covered technology and high-tech companies for longer than she’d care to admit. She started out as a reporter for InfoWorld, covering Boston-area software companies; then moved over to CRN where she managed the news staff and covered the business both in terms of technology and how technology is sold. She was also news editor for TechWeb and senior news director at TechTarget before joining GigaOM. Barb enjoys seeing how old-school IT companies are (mis)managing their transition into the cloud computing era. She has won several ASBPE awards for her news coverage. Outside of work, she loves gardening, movies and baseball.
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My Focus
Cloud computing
Infrastructure
Recent Posts
Metallica may not be the house band for PHP programmers, but it comes close. The heavy metal rockers are the group that most PHP coders like to listen to while they work, according to a new survey of 3,335 coders by Zend. Read More »
In this era of cheap-and-reliable renta-data centers run by Amazon, Rackspace, and others, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on it’s own? Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s own James Hamilton doesn’t think so. More surprisingly, other IT pros agree. Read More »
For those in a perpetual snit about personal data privacy, here’s bold proposal from Michael Driscoll: Donate your own medical data. And do it now — don’t wait till you’re dead. What better way to make big data truly relevant — and helpful — to … Read More »
Salesforce.com’s plan to purchase Rypple shows the importance of human capital management to the new cloud-savvy enterprise. The game plan calls for a new Salesforce.com HCM business unit and the relabeling of Rypple’s offerings as “Successforce.” The effort will be directed by industry vet John Wookey. Read More »
After a long-running controversy, the Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that’s final. The City Council voted to kill the proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD although the city’s other 17,000 employees are still aboard. Read More »
IBM is buying Emptoris, a specialist in supply chain and contract management analytics, in what is the latest example of an entrenched IT provider’s buying analytics and cloud capabilities. The move comes a week after IBM’s $440 million buyout of DemandTec. Read More »
More Must Reads
Did you know that the proceeds from cyber weekend sales surpassed the entire budget of Bulgaria? Or that people will create 1.2 trillion GB of data this year — that’s equivalent to 75 billion 16 GB iPods. These nuggets courtesy of Emerson Network Power. Read More »
It may not be man-bites-dog but it is still surprising to hear about a software as a service vendor moving towards on-premises deployment. And yet that is just what Birst is doing, first with its business intelligence service and now with its home-grown in-memory database. Read More »
Microsoft’s SkyDrive is coming to an iPhone near you, the company said this week. A new app means that iPhone users can store and access their personal photos, files and documents in SkyDrive as opposed to, say, Apple’s own iCloud. Read More »
In the latest salvo in the ever-hotter cloud storage battle, YouSendIt added iPad and Android client apps to its cloud-based document sync, transfer and storage service, as well as updated iPhone and Windows desktop apps. A new Mac desktop version is in beta. Read More »
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as a service (PaaS) now supports Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript development framework. That could give Azure more traction beyond the Microsoft .NET faithful. Also new: a limited trial of Hadoop-based distribution for Azure. Read More »
After a long look at the performance of cloud storage providers, only six of the 16 largest CSPs made the grade and the two top dogs were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, said Nasuni, a data continuity specialist that works with all the major CSPs. Read More »
The cloud-based SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP’s enterprise customers. SAP will sell and provision NetBase semantic search and analytics capabilities and provide a user-friendly dashboard to display the results on an iPad or other device. Read More »
Northwestern University is doing its bit to feed the need for analytics skills in this era of big data. NU’s McCormick School of Engineering launched a new Master of Science degree in analytics and is accepting applications for the inaugural class. Read More »
Most venture capitalists obsess on the latest shiny object for youngish consumers. That’s remarkably shortsighted. The aging U.S. population is a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs that can build technologies to help this huge population remain active and stay in their homes as long as possible. Read More »
You might think that tech companies are more flexible and resourceful in seeking out the best talent. But you would be wrong, said Allen Delattre, global managing director for technology for Korn/Ferry International, the big executive recruitment firm. Read More »
LexisNexis is pressing MarkLogic’s technology into service for its just-launched Lexis Advance legal service. MarkLogic’s document storage, search and analytics technology replaces legacy home-built code as part of a platform modernization and big data push. Read More »
Amazon is scheduling what looks to be a significant number of reboots to customer EC2 instances in the coming weeks. Customers started getting letters informing them of the instance restarts on Tuesday, according to Cloudscaling. It is unclear what issue the patches address. Read More »
As companies move to the cloud, DevOps — the practice where developers work with the operations side of the house — becomes more important. That collaboration could lead to more satisfying IT implementations and the best — and sanctioned — use of cloud resources. Read More »
Digital Reasoning, a somewhat shadowy specialist in big data analytics for the U.S. intelligence community, announced B Series funding and named industry vet John Brennan to its board. Funding came from CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, as well as some Silver Lake Sumeru partners and other unnamed investors. Read More »
The Great Firewall of China is preventing local programmers from downloading the latest Node.js programming framework. The problem is that the version number corresponds to the June 4, 1989 government crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Read More »
The race for market share among cloud storage providers continues with some HP PCs now offering an easy on-ramp to Box.net’s cloud storage. But how much traction can a PC bundle get when most business users rely more and more on their mobile devices? Read More »
SAP America’s decision to buy SuccessFactors and its human capital management expertise for $3.4 billion in cash, is just the latest acquisition of a vertically-focused SaaS player by a legacy software giant. Look for that trend to continue. Read More »
Online games powerhouse Zynga is shooting to reap $1billion in its IPO, according to an amended prospectus filed on Friday. The company behind Farmville, Mafia Wars and other games expects to offer 100 million shares of common stock at $8.50 to $10.00 per share. Read More »
Security concerns are always cited as the primary inhibitor to wider cloud adoption by businesses, but Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle says the security model for the cloud is already here and working just fine, thank you very much. Read More »
Node.js is following in Ruby on Rails’ and NoSQL’s footsteps to become the next hacker technology to be embraced by the enterprise. Just ask Flotype, the Berkeley, CA. startup which built its NowJS architecture atop Node.js, the server-side JavaScript-based toolset. Read More »
If you’re a Software-as-a-Service provider and want to wring the richest rewards out of what is already a lucrative gig, you should “verticalize” your services. That’s according to a newly published report from Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert. Read More »
So the big data backlash begins. The Hadoop framework does a lot, but some experts — including those who push non-Hadoop options — say it’s not enough for many specialized apps where a build-your-own Hadoop implementation costs too much to be a real contender. Read More »
Windows Azure is an ambitious PaaS that doesn’t get a lot of love from web developers. Here are four things Microsoft must do to make it a more compelling option for the new-age, non-.NET developers who now flock to Amazon Web Services or another PaaS. Read More »
With its new Idol 10 software, Hewlett-Packard brings together key Vertica and Autonomy technologies acquired over the last year for an assault on knotty big data problems. HP says the software can collect and analyze unstructured data including video, audio and social net feeds. Read More »
Here’s hoping 2012 will be the year we separate the wheat from the chaff in cloud computing. At the very least, more businesses will know about the potential benefits and pitfalls of cloud computing so they can differentiate the real from the bogus. Read More »
New research shows that software-as-a-service companies, which have been valued (much) higher than legacy software players, will continue to reap price premiums over the next 12 to 24 months. The numbers come from Martin Wolf’s M&A Advisors’ MW Index. Read More »
Retailers already parse a ton of data — from ERP systems, from registers, from Twitter and Facebook. That pool of addressable data will only get bigger as more retailers revisit using RFID to prevent losses, says Steve Stone, former CIO of Lowe’s Home Improvement stores. Read More »
Hewlett-Packard continues to struggle with fallout from the decision to nix its webOS-based tablets, a less-than-stellar mix of IT services, and its newly completed acquisition of Autonomy. The question is how long those reverberations will impact the company’s profitability and growth prospects. Read More »
SAP ‘s looking for acquisitions to help the enterprise software giant enter new “categories,” co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said this week in comments that sparked a flurry of conjecture about potential targets. So what’s it going to buy to beef up its cloud- and consumer-cred? Read More »
In the latest indication that Node.js support is table stakes for all Platform-as-a-Service players, Engine Yard is adding support for the popular server-side framework as part of a trial program. Developers like to use Node.js because it supports JavaScript and is fast and scalable. Read More »
Google may be a giant in Internet search, but it’s still a 98-pound weakling in business-oriented application development tools. That doesn’t stop it from trying to bulk up: This week Google opened up its revamped BigQuery data analysis service to more users. Read More »
Mayfield Fund named Sandeep Johri as its new executive in residence. He willl use his experience in enterprise software to drive the VC’s enterprise strategy. Johri helped drive HP’s cloud and enterprise strategy and also held management posts at Silicon Graphics and Gemini Consulting. Read More »
Data center operator Telx will break ground soon on a 215,000-square-foot data center next to an existing facility in Clifton, N.J. The network-rich Clifton Cloud Connection Center will target customers that want to build hybrid cloud computing solutions. Read More »
Despite a tough economy, technology investors expect to fund more cloud-computing-related technologies, according to new research. More than half of those surveyed by Peachtree Capital predicted investment growth in cloud technology going forward. Read More »
DataSift, the British company that built its business filtering and sorting through reams of Twitter data in real time, has brought its act to the U.S., opening a San Francisco office. Businesses use DataSift to glean information about user impressions of their products and services. Read More »
Fujitsu’s new hybrid implementation of Microsoft Windows Azure could address corporate concerns about deploying global workloads on Microsoft’s public cloud. With Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, Fujitsu can use its global presence to make sure that data stays within prescribed areas Read More »
Servicemesh snagged $15 million in initial venture funding from Ignition Partners and Ignition’s Frank Artale will join the board. Four-year-old Servicemesh focuses on helping large companies make sure their cloud service deployments meet governance and compliance policies. Read More »
If the U.S. wants to solve it’s healthcare problem, it should bring the Internet model to bear on it, Microsoft’s chief strategy and research officer said Monday. That means sharing, not segregating data, and using the government’s buying power to mandate change, Craig Mundie said. Read More »
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