While cloud, mobility, social, and analytics have been driving demand for IT products and services in 2012, the worldwide IT spending picture has become dimmer as the year has progressed: We’re looking at 5.1 percent worldwide IT spending growth in 2012. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two tech conferences took place this week on opposite coasts. One featured storage product updates and cocktails at Fenway Park. The other highlighted augmented-reality glasses and skydivers. One was the Red Hat Summit, the other Google I/O. Guess which was which. Read more »
Oracle’s rumored NoSQL database made its splashy debut along with its Big Data Appliance at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 yesterday. Less trumpeted was news that MySQL, the venerable open-source database for cloud companies, hit a milestone, offering faster queries and more powerful clustering. Read more »
Exalytics, an appliance for near-real-time business intelligence applications, debuted at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Sunday night. A key part of Oracle’s big data strategy, Exalytics layers in-memory and multi-dimensional database technology atop 40 Intel Xeon cores, all running in parallel, said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Read more »
Oracle’s cloud computing stance has evolved, to say the least, over the past few years. As the company preps for its annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-show in San Francisco next week, a huge question lingers: Does Oracle–and its CEO Larry Ellison–really “get” the cloud? Read more »
IBM shares were trading up Tuesday morning after it reported strong second-quarter results yesterday. While Big Blue got a profit boost from recently released mainframe products, it also gave us some indications for the future growth of the cloud and big data. Read more »
Khosla Ventures, the firm of influential venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, is raising a new $1.05 billion fund — Khosla Ventures IV — according to an SEC filing. The filing comes just a little over a year since the firm closed on $1.3 billion. Read more »
Close to three dozen CEOs of clean power companies — from First Solar to SunPower to Nanosolar — are pleading with congressional leaders to save the funding for the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. 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 »
The second quarter of 2010 belonged to the little guys and the new guys. Almost across the board, from processors to virtualization to cloud services, relatively small vendors and startups had the market cornered on innovation and mindshare. And where there’s tinder in the forms of customer demand, products, funding and a greater societal movement toward environmentalism, something is bound to catch fire. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Today forward thinking developers are eying the iPad — tomorrow they’ll be focused on your family sedan. These so-called connected cars will ultimately offer a next-generation platform for entrepreneurs and car makers to develop auto-focused applications. Read more »
It’s hard to top having Barack Obama as a live-chat guest, but that isn’t stopping YouTube, who is following up their user-generated interview with the President with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Next Tuesday, Mar. 16, Genachowski will be answering user-submitted questions to topics like Access and […] Read more »
Microsoft and HP today announced the two companies would invest $250 million over the next three years to create an optimized platform for cloud computing. The move exemplifies a trend that should worry open cloud advocates and is a blow to Dell, Oracle and perhaps IBM. Read more »
Large manufacturers have been tinkering with smart appliances — dishwashers, microwaves and other devices embedded with communications technology — for years. During the height of the dot-com bubble, connected appliances saw renewed hype, with announcements like that of Sun Microsystems, whose CEO Scott McNealy paired a […] Read more »
The last decade has seen tremendous evolution and innovation in storage array technology — from the introduction of thin provisioning and ultra-wide data striping to storage virtualization in various forms of deployment, along with new generations of disk arrays, creative data retention and tiering. Many of the technologies introduced have caused significant disruption in the storage market and brought new and creative value propositions to corporate data centers the world over, lowering both storage array purchase costs and the extended cost of managing them. Many of the new innovations have enabled IT enterprises to reduce power and cooling costs, consolidate data centers and floor space, and repurpose storage assets and extend their useful life. However, even with all the advancements in storage technology, there are still gaps that need to be filled — such as in the areas of security and data de-duplication. This report looks at current key players in the storage market, highlights market drivers and the technology gaps that present opportunities for companies in the space, and forecasts the relative potential of key players going forward. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
On Aug. 10, 2009, VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held open source Java application framework and platform developer SpringSource for $420 million ($331 million in cash, $31 million in equity for vested options, $58 million for unvested stocks/options). Customers will ultimately care about ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As a responsible Mac user, I usually feel immune from most Internet threats…except for one. Using my Mac exactly as Apple intends it to be used sometimes renders my Internet connection virtually unusable for up to a month, and costs money to fix. Could this happen […] Read more »
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is rethinking his earlier disdain for software as a service and all things cloud, according to a report today in The Wall Street Journal. Maybe a dismal economy and a drop in Oracle sales are forcing him to change his position. The […] Read more »
The storage industry is on the cusp of the biggest structural change since networked storage began to substitute for direct-attached storage a decade ago. Despite being one of the fastest growing technology sectors in terms of capacity, the economics for many participants are deteriorating. Several major technology shifts will radically redefine the economics of the industry leading to slimmer margins for all but the most innovative, software-driven players. In essence, the future of storage is about storage software that increasingly absorbs intelligence that used to be hard-wired in a proprietary storage controller and array, which in turn is increasingly becoming an abundant pool of commodity disks. It is the pace of this transition that is at issue. In this report, we show how the different customer segments and associated workloads will evolve at different paces, and examine the associated opportunities for both incumbents and new market entrants. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
After a slow start, IPTV, or Internet Protocol Television, has become established as a legitimate pay TV alternative to satellite and cable. Now that several IPTV operators have each attracted more than 2 million subscribers, IPTV has begun to attract the attention of media companies and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
