“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data’s fine; the right data’s a game changer. Serial database entrepreneur Andy Palmer — who co-founded Vertica Systems and VoltDB — sees this massive amount of diverse big data as table stakes. The real, compelling value lies in “big analytics,” he says. Read more »
It may not be Silicon Valley but the Boston-Cambridge metro area has a lot going for it — infrastructure expertise, a deep talent pool, and VC funding. Facebook famously went elsewhere, but here’s why other local companies started here (and will stay put.) Read more »
Looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced it’s getting into the big data game. Read more »
How do the heavy weights of the Internet and telecom stack up in terms of how green their technology, energy footprint and political advocacy are? On Tuesday night Greenpeace released its latest Cool IT leaderboard report, which ranks the world’s largest IT giants. Read more »
With its Project Lightning server-side flash cache, aka VFcache, EMC hopes to show itself as a forward-looking storage provider. But until it loses its big box, scale-up mentality, it won’t be much of a factor in webscale data centers that go for scale-out everything. Read more »
EMC’s promised Project Lightning server-based flash storage product is now available under the VFCache brand. But EMC’s not done — it plans a bigger, more powerful flash appliance dubbed Project Thunder, due later this year. Both products take direct aim at the Fusion-IO threat. Read more »
Oracle and HP used to coexist quite well — People forget that the first Oracle Exadata ran on HP hardware. Then Oracle bought Sun and things went downhill fast. Public spats played out in CEO letters to The New York Times, and now court documents. Read more »
It looks like some of the bloom is off the SaaS rose. New numbers show the booming growth in valuations of SaaS companies is slowing after a long run-up as pure-play SaaS companies face more competition from legacy players. Read more »
HP won a tactical battle last night when a judge tossed out an Oracle fraud claim. But it also lost one — when he unsealed previously redacted documents that show just how desperate HP was to keep Oracle working on software for HP’s Itanium servers. Read more »
One of the year’s largest smart grid conferences — DistribuTECH — closes today in San Antonio, Texas. It’s like the CES for utilities, power companies and the vendors that are trying to sell them stuff. Here are the top 10 trends I took away. Read more »
IBM is working the reins of its Smarter Commerce initiative by rolling out a new Netezza analytics appliance designed to help retailers churn through potentially petabytes of consumer sales data in real time. It’s trying to capitalize on the increased importance of e-commerce to revenues. Read more »
The greater Boston area may not be the hub of the big data universe that some recent research suggests, but it got a leg up this week with news that tech giant Hewlett-Packard is moving some of its big data operations to Cambridge. Read more »
To hear IBM and Microsoft tell it, their respective cloud strategies are coming along nicely, thank you very much. But given the hazy definitions of cloud computing and the lack of real numbers, it’s hard to tell if that really is the case. Read more »
Executives at NoSQL startups are keeping a brave face in response to Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB offering. They cite the new product as a validation, while generally dismissing the competitive ramifications of having Amazon now playing in the same pool. But is that confidence justified? Read more »
Amazon Web Services is adding a home-grown NoSQL database to its roster of cloud computing offerings. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls DynamoDB a “fully managed” NoSQL implementation the company built over the years and and tested by customers for a few months. Read more »
When SAP pre-announced better-than-expected earnings, there was no mention of cloud computing. But, there is a feeling that the company, as it completes its buyout of SuccessFactors and closes more Business ByDesign deals, might be able to put its reputation of cloud cluelessness behind it. Read more »
Oracle’s Big Data Appliance is now for sale, featuring Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management tools. Regardless of what anybody thinks about Oracle’s strategy, the deal is a coup for Cloudera as it tries to fend off competition from fellow Hadoop startups Hortonworks and MapR. Read more »
The wave of M&A activity swelling the cloud services sector won’t stop with in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena. Internap’s $30 million purchase of Voxel, announced early this week, signals a land rush for cloud services, with many smaller, capable cloud providers now in play. Read more »
Piazza, the social network that lets college students and instructors discuss material online, has closed on $6 million in a new Series A funding round. Piazza’s service is meant to counteract study group snobbery and eliminate students’ fear of asking “dumb” questions. Read more »
On New Year’s Day, Ginny Rometty took the reins at IBM. Big Blue is on a roll: its stock outperformed Google and Apple this year, and Warren Buffett is a fan. But the IT giant faces perils as well as opportunities going into 2012. Read more »
Boston-area tech incubator Adverplex is reborn as Cogo Labs and is starting to talk itself up. The 30-person shop, which backed CourseAdvisor and Autotegrity, is also on the hunt for software, analytics and data warehousing talent. Read more »
“Cloud first” markets — those where companies’ first serious engagements with information technology are in the form of cloud computing — are beginning to emerge. For the BRIC economies in particular, this might mean a chance to adopt low-cost solutions that will give companies a clear ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
To hear Typesafe folks tell it, the Scala programming language and associated middleware is about to join the ranks of first-tier development tools. And, a new Scala plug-in for the popular Eclipse integrated development environment should help pave the way. Read more »
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read more »
Oracle is finally learning that the hardware business is not the software business. Revenue for the company’s Sun Microsystems-rooted servers fell 14 percent in the second quarter compared to the year-ago period. And gross margin on those hardware sales is returning to earth. 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 »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
