Incapsula is trying to democratize web site security and performance by utilizing the distributed, yet centralized, nature of cloud computing. In some ways, its namesake product is the epitome of a cloud service because it utilizes both crowdsourcing and centralization to create the best-possible experience. Read more »
Unstructured database provider MarkLogic has a new CEO with big-business experience and plans to take fast-growing company public. MarkLogic is nowhere near the size of CEO Ken Bado’s former employer, Autodesk, but it does have a healthy business that belies its relative youth and NoSQL ties. Read more »
VMware officially entered the service provider market by taking over operations of the Mozy storage service from EMC. VMware CTO Steven Herrod announced the news on his blog today, writing that “VMware has hired the team and acquired assets behind EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service.” Read more »
NoSQL vendor Couchbase is targeting developers using Mac OS X with a new version of its Membase Server and an upgraded Couchbase Server designed specifically for that platform. Mac is hardly the most popular choice among developers, but its popularity appears to be picking up. Read more »
Startup medical search company Apixio is trying to save lives by bringing machine-learning and natural-language-processing techniques to medical records, giving doctors a patient’s entire relevant medical history via a simple cloud-based search engine. The goal is to make information-sharing among medical providers far more intelligent. Read more »
The merger between CenturyLink and Qwest officially closed today, creating the nation’s third largest phone company in a world where being a phone company means less and less. I spoke with a company executive about making cloud acquisitions and the ever-growing demand for bandwidth. Read more »
A handful of new releases and partnerships this week — as well as a big award — illustrate just how versatile the data-processing tool Hadoop is and how widespread its use might become. Hadoop is becoming a more viable tool for everyone from business users to journalists. Read more »
Researchers at the University of Washington utilized the Cloudant NoSQL database as part of an experiment that determined radiation levels in Seattle as a result of the recent Fukushima nuclear disaster are “well below alarming limits” at that particular location. Read more »
According to a survey by AFCOM, cloud computing is on the rise among data center operators, more than doubling since last year and expected to reach 80-90 percent in the next five years. The survey also shows that energy efficiency is driving data center decisions. Read more »
When is a technology company dead? It is something that has been on my mind lately. My definition of a dead tech company has less to do with the company’s numbers and more about its abilities. Of course, that is different from what others think. Read more »
Hardware rarely comes up in discussions about big data, save for those centered on data warehouse appliances. But the omission hardly means hardware is irrelevant. In fact, big gear might become a big deal as companies look to bolster the performance of their big data systems. Read more »
The NoSQL database space is little more crowded this morning, as Citrusleaf officially launched with its eponymous product, which promises users the best of both the relational and NoSQL worlds. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced a reported $2 million initial round of funding. Read more »
Will Facebook rise to Green Peace’s challenge to pledge to cut coal from its data centers by Earth Day on April 22? On the day before Earth Day, on April 21 at Green:Net 2011, Green Peace will discuss its challenge, and unveil some new data. Read more »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Canadian social-media monitoring company Radian6 for a total of $326 million in cash and stock, and says that it will make the company’s tools and services a core part of its Sales Cloud customer-relationship management dashboard for businesses. Read more »
Unlike the cap and congestion crowd, Verizon Communications keeps upgrading its network, planning for the cloud and streaming era coming up. It plans to upgrade backbone pipes in the U.S. along select routes to 100 Gigabit per second capacity before the second quarter of this year. Read more »
High-performance computing leader Platform Computing hopes to capitalize on the big data movement by spreading its wings beyond its flagship business of managing clusters and grids and into managing MapReduce environments, too. Platform has a solid foundation among leading businesses, especially in the financial services industry. Read more »
Cisco said it plans to buy newScale, a software provider that allows more control and visibility inside a compute cloud. The deal highlights the rise in M&A activity among cloud vendors as well as the need for more accountability in corporate cloud environments. Read more »
One of the statements that struck me most from Structure: Big Data was CA CTO Donald Ferguson’s notion that big data represents a “very promising” opportunity for startups, particularly those targeting specific target use cases. I think he’s right, particularly with regard to the latter part. Read more »
Ravel wants to provide a supported open source version of Google’s Pregel software called Golden Orb to handle large-scale graph analytics. Ravel COO Zach Richardson told me in the following video interview that the startup would release the Golden Orb code on March 31st. Read more »
Amazon Web Services this morning announced dedicated EC2 instances for customers using AWS’s newly upgraded Virtual Private Cloud service. This is yet another example of AWS pushing the innovation envelope despite its customer lead, although Dedicated Instances are a bit pricier than some recent free tools. Read more »
This past weekend, beta-phase PaaS offering PHP Fog was hacked and vandalized by a couple of teenagers, a situation that raises serious questions about cloud security. But the questions aren’t just about technology; the case also raises issues about who’s ultimately responsible for security breaches. Read more »
It turns out that “big data” isn’t just a buzzword, but a legitimate concern for companies across the board. Their interest in the tools to take advantage of the opportunity for data analysis has sparked a land grab among software vendors centered around Hadoop. Read more »
Mapr, a stealth-mode start-up with about 30 employees is developing a version of Hadoop and plans to compete with the likes of Cloudera. The company is likely to launch later this year and has been funded by Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA. Read more »
With so much data flowing over networks and with so much computing power needed to crunch that data, computing infrastructure needs to be as low power as possible to both make the era of “big data” economical and also more eco-friendly. Read more »
At our Structure: Big Data conference, CA Technologies CTO Donald Ferguson suggested that big data might actually be a driving force behind the adoption of cloud computing because variable workloads are ideal for utility billing models. More of his thoughts here. Read more »
Estimates say that 90 percent of all data was created in the last two years alone. That staggering figure can lead to analysis paralysis for some organizations, but those that can sift through, analyze and take action on information faster than others will enjoy competitive advantages. Read more »
When it comes to social data, one of the biggest firehoses around is the one that comes from Twitter. Trying to make sense of 140 million tweets a day in something close to real-time is a significant challenge, says Tap11 chief technology officer Braxton Woodham. Read more »
Pete Warden got famous for scraping 220 million Facebook profiles and then analyzing this data to unearth U.S.-wide user connection trends. Now he wants you to be able to do the same with a new web service released at GigaOM’s Structure Big Data conference today. Read more »
Andy Bechtolsheim — computing pioneer, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now CDO of Arista Networks — says when it comes to the trend of big data, keep a close eye on open source. Read more »
Google may have more distributed data than any other company but it still takes user input to create smarter machines. Google’s Voice Search speech recognition, for example, began to improve when the service started to train itself and improve accuracy through the use of end-user data Read more »
During an afternoon panel entitled “The Many Faces of MapReduce — Hadoop and Beyond,” moderator Gary Orenstein compared the two primary Hadoop components — MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System — to the meat and bread of a sandwich. Read more »
Dave Hitz — data storage pioneer and co-founder of NetApp — doesn’t like the term big data. But, if he must use the moniker, he acknowledges that big data and analytics are what are keeping the storage industry interesting and driving business right now. Read more »
NoSQL startup DataStax officially entered the pantheon of Hadoop providers today, introducing its own distribution called “Brisk.” Brisk utilizes the open source NoSQL database Cassandra as a replacement for Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System, as well as Cassandra’s built-in MapReduce engine and Hive. Read more »
A few providers are not just creating huge data dumps — collecting and structuring data from multiple sources — but creating marketplaces for others to find and use that data. They include Microsoft’s Windows Azure DataMarket and InfoChimp, who hope to connect enterprises with the data they want Read more »
At GigaOM’s Structure Big Data event in New York City, we gathered big data disruptors from Bundle, Revolution Analytics, Stanford and other organizations to talk about how they’ve found new business opportunities, created architectures to better analyze the data and discovered new applications for big data. Read more »
Data isn’t the solution to business problems. Pulling data into applications and using it to make decisions and improve the user experience is the way to solve business problems said Jim Baum, the CEO of Netezza, at Structure Big Data. Read more »
Barnes & Noble VP Marc Parrish addresses the evolution of books. Authors have always been trying to publish as universally as possible. Now with electronic publishing, the idea is to try to get your media out to the greatest number of people as quickly as possible. Read more »
Being able to process and understand big data has enabled new business models to emerge. But for the next generation of applications to flourish, EMC CTO Luke Lonergren says that data will need to be accessible even to folks that aren’t necessarily data scientists. Read more »
As the amount of captured data grows, how can businesses make more sense of it, use it for accurate predictions and better understand their customers? The answer may lie in the world of physics: the concept of space-time paired with data improves predictions through context. Read more »
