Cloud Computing Articles
Websites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have brought social networking and the concept of online community to a huge cross-section of our society. Penetration and usage of these platforms may vary depending on demographic (age and geography, in particular), but no one can debate the impact of Facebook and Twitter on both everyday life and on society in general.
Posted July 19, 2012
HiT Software, a provider of data replication and change data capture (CDC) solutions for heterogeneous database environments, has announced the release of DBMoto Cloud Edition, the first product in a family of data replication and CDC software designed to support cloud data traffic. DBMoto Cloud Edition has been designed to deliver rapid, secure data updates between disconnected databases. Data changes are captured and passed through the cloud using web services, providing reliable CDC for satellite enterprise databases that have no direct connection to corporate IT systems.
Posted July 16, 2012
Compuware Corporation has launched a free online cloud service enabling organizations to compare the speed of their website's performance against leading competitor sites. SpeedoftheWeb.org provides a series of industry-relevant indexes with categorized collections of 1,000 of the world's most trafficked websites - as ranked by Alexa and Compuware Gomez benchmarks. As end-user expectations become greater, the cost of poor website performance also grows, both in terms of lost revenues and brand loyalty. In addition, end users are showing less patience for slow-performing websites, according to Compuware. In response to these heightening requirements, organizations need to ensure performance along every spot in the web application delivery chain, Alois Reitbauer, Compuware APM's Web 2.0 and Mobile Performance Expert and author of Java Enterprise Performance, tells DBTA.
Posted July 09, 2012
Angie's List, the consumer review website, has adopted Oracle's customer experience suite, RightNow CX Cloud Service, to allow it to reach its core technology goals of combining email and chat into a single platform to help reduce agent inefficiencies and increase customer engagement and cost savings.
Posted July 05, 2012
Dell and Quest Software announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Quest, an IT management software provider offering a broad selection of solutions that solve the most common and most challenging IT problems. Under terms of the agreement, approved by the boards of directors of both companies, Dell will pay $28 per share in cash for each share of Quest for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.4 billion, net of Quest's cash and debt. The transaction is expected to close in Dell's third fiscal quarter, subject to approval by Quest's shareholders and customary conditions.
Posted July 02, 2012
In a live presentation that was also made available on the web, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle's cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a new enterprise social platform offering. "We made a decision to rebuild all of our applications for the cloud almost 7 years ago. We called that project ‘Fusion,'" he told the audience. While joking that, at the time, some competitors called it "con-fusion," Ellison also recounted the years of work, input from thousands of people, and billions of dollars that were required to enable Oracle to make the transition from being an on-premise application provider to being a cloud application provider - as well as an on-premise application provider - and to rewrite and modernize all of its applications.
Posted June 28, 2012
Lucid Imagination, a developer of search, discovery and analytics software based on Apache Lucene and Apache Solr technology, has unveiled LucidWorks Big Data, a fully integrated development stack that combines advantages of multiple open source projects including Hadoop, Mahout, R and Lucene/Solr to provide search, machine learning, recommendation engines and analytics for structured and unstructured content in one solution available in the cloud. "With more and more companies being challenged by the explosive growth of information, as has been widely reported, the vast majority of that content is unstructured or semi structured text, and traditional business intelligence or traditional analytics methodologies don't come close to addressing the vast percentage of content," Paul Doscher, CEO of Lucid Imagination, tells DBTA.
Posted June 28, 2012
SAP AG and Ariba, Inc. announced that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has entered into an agreement to acquire Ariba, a cloud-based business commerce network, for $45 per share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $4.3 billion. The acquisition is intended to combine Ariba's buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP's customer base and business process expertise to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of calendar year 2012, subject to Ariba stockholder approval, clearances by relevant regulatory authorities and other customary closing conditions.
Posted June 27, 2012
Companies are scrambling to learn all the various ways they can slice, dice, and mine big data coming in from across the enterprise and across the web. But with the rise of big data — hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data — comes the challenge of where and how all of this information will be stored. For many organizations, current storage systems — disks, tapes, virtual tapes, clouds, inmemory systems — are not ready for the onslaught, industry experts say. There are new methodologies and technologies coming on the scene that may help address this challenge. But one thing is certain: Whether organizations manage their data in their internal data centers, or in the cloud, a lot more storage is going to be needed. As Jared Rosoff, director of customer engagement with 10gen, puts it: "Big data means we need ‘big storage.'"
Posted June 13, 2012
To help customers optimize the value of their technology investments, Oracle has announced Oracle Platinum Services. The Oracle Platinum Services are available at no charge as part of a standard support contract to customers with either Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8, Oracle Exalogic X2-2, and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 Servers with Exadata storage, Sun ZFS Storage or Oracle's Pillar Axiom 600 Storage. To access Oracle Platinum Services, customers install a patented, secure monitoring gateway that will allow Oracle to deploy quarterly updates on their behalf. With the new services, Oracle is delivering what it thinks is the highest level of service in the industry, says Larry Abramson, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services.
Posted June 13, 2012
Closely following its announcement of plans to acquire Vitrue, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform, Oracle says it has also entered into an agreement to acquire Collective Intellect, a provider of cloud-based social intelligence solutions. The Collective Intellect transaction is expected to close in the second half of the year; and the Vitrue acquisition, which was announced on May 23, is expected to close in the summer of 2012.
Posted June 06, 2012
Kapow Software, a provider of social media, cloud, and big data solutions, has announced a strategic partnership with Informatica Corporation to deliver Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst. This solution harnesses the power of the web, cloud applications and social media, allowing IT and line-of-business users alike to access and extract relevant information from disparate data sources in real time. The solution will be integrated into Informatica 9.5, which is scheduled to be released at the end of June.
Posted May 29, 2012
Google has announced that Google BigQuery, a web service that lets users do interactive analysis of massive data sets, is now available to the public. Billed as enabling customers to "analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button," the company says the data is secured, replicated across data centers, and can be easily exported.
Posted May 23, 2012
Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration software and services, has announced the latest release of its Informatica Cloud solution. Offered as an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), the latest release from Informatica features the Cloud Connector Toolkit, Cloud Integration Templates, and new enterprise features, all of which are part of the new Informatica Cloud Developer Edition and allow developers to rapidly embed end-user customizable integration logic and connectivity into cloud applications.
Posted May 23, 2012
Organizations are struggling with big data, which they define as any large-size data store that becomes unmanageable by standard technologies or methods, according to a new survey of 264 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with MarkLogic in January 2012. Among the key findings uncovered by the survey is the fact that unstructured data is on the rise, and ready to engulf current data management systems. Added to that concern, say respondents, is their belief that management does not understand the challenge that is looming, and is failing to recognize the significance of unstructured data assets to the business.
Posted May 09, 2012
TIBCO Software Inc., a provider of infrastructure software on-premise and in the cloud, has announced the latest version of its analytics platform: Spotfire 4.5. This new release will feature visualization-based data discovery and collaboration capabilities for all types of extreme information, including big data. Additionally, Spotfire 4.5 will provide greater data exploration and new predictive analytics capabilities of both structured data and unstructured content, as well as iPad compatibility that allows users to construct "private-branded" Spotfire Analytics solutions. Together, these capabilities are intended to offer organizations the ability to leverage all of their data to better discover and predict business outcomes that can be delivered to a larger population.
Posted May 08, 2012
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), will co-host the OAUG Connection Point - Release 12.1/Fusion Applications conference, in partnership with the South Texas Oracle Applications Users Group (STOAUG) and the OAUG Upgrade SIG, July 11-12 at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown in Austin, Tex. The call for presentations for the event is open through May 10.
Posted May 03, 2012
Teradata and Aprimo, a Teradata company that provides integrated marketing management software, have signed of a definitive agreement to acquire Munich-based eCircle, a European provider of cloud-based digital marketing software. According to Teradata, the addition of eCircle more than triples Aprimo's European team, expertise and reach in all major European countries, and enables the delivery of eCircle solutions globally. The transaction is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2012.
Posted May 02, 2012
SAP unveiled its roadmap for the database and mobile markets. At a press conference in San Francisco that was also made available online, Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of the SAP executive Board, Technology & Innovation, said the company's vision for the SAP real-time data platform includes the SAP HANA platform, Sybase data management offerings, and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). "In our minds, and in our customers' minds there is now absolutely no doubt that HANA represents the database architecture for the future, for OLTP and OLAP, for analyzing structured and unstructured data, for legacy applications and for new applications," Sikka told the audience.
Posted April 25, 2012
Basho Technologies, a provider of distributed database technologies, has released Riak CS, a scalable software solution designed to provide distributed public and private cloud storage. This release marks Basho's entrance into the cloud storage market. Riak CS is "designed to help a company build a very large, scalable but inexpensive cloud storage platform either in their cloud computing stack or as a private/public storage platform," Bobby Patrick, CMO of Basho Technologies explains to 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 19, 2012
Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for MySQL and Oracle, has introduced Continuent Tungsten Enterprise 1.5 to help manage increasing data volume, complexity, speed, and concurrency in the cloud or on-premise. "Tungsten Enterprise consolidates geo-clustering, archive, backup and disaster recovery through seamless integration with the cloud," says Robert Hodges, CEO at Continuent. "By combining multi-master, multi-site clustering with Amazon EC2, Tungsten Enterprise enables new levels of speed, simplicity and reliability for database clustering, backup and recovery while reducing costs."
Posted April 12, 2012
IBM introduced PureSystems, a new family of "expert integrated systems," with built-in expertise based on IBM's decades of experience running IT operations for tens of thousands of clients in 170 countries. With the aim of integrating all IT elements, both physical and virtual, IBM says the new systems offer clients an alternative to today's enterprise computing model, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain. According to IBM, PureSystems is the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over 4 years.
Posted April 11, 2012
There's no question that cloud computing is a hot commodity these days. Companies of all types and sizes are embracing cloud computing-both internally and from external service providers - as a way to cost-effectively build new capabilities. With the rapid growth of cloud comes new questions about responsibility within organizations, in terms of how services will be paid for, who has ultimate say over cloud decisions, and how cloud fits into the overall strategic direction of the business.
Posted March 28, 2012
IBM has announced new software to beef up its SmartCloud line of management and monitoring tools for cloud deployments. IBM's new SmartCloud Foundation offerings enable organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with enhanced levels of control, the vendor says.
Posted March 19, 2012
Quest Software said it has entered into definitive agreements with affiliates of Insight Venture Partners to become a private company. In the deal, stockholders would receive $23 per share in cash, valuing the company at approximately $2.0 billion. Upon closing, Quest will be a privately held company and will continue to be led by chairman and CEO Vinny Smith and the existing senior management team. "As a private company, we will have increased flexibility to drive innovation across our product lines and execute our long-term strategy," said Smith in a statement released by the company.
Posted March 09, 2012
BMC Software, a provider of enterprise systems tools, announced the availability of the winter release of its cloud-based Remedyforce Service Desk solution, which includes new capabilities for service request management and the integration of social media and external sources. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution is intended to help organizations manage the "consumerization of IT" phenomenon. Through the capabilities of Salesforce Chatter, a leading enterprise social network, BMC Remedyforce Service Desk helps IT professionals interact with each other, and archives Chatter feeds and other sources in the solution's knowledge management system.
Posted March 05, 2012
In celebration of ODBC's 20th anniversary this year, Progress Software Corporation has unveiled its Platinum ODBC drivers, Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC 7.0. The standards-based, fully interoperable Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC 7.0 driver allows application developers to reliably exchange data between cloud data and disparate data sources.
Posted February 23, 2012
The challenges of maintaining security and regulatory compliance as applications increasingly move to the cloud - whether public, private or hybrid - will come into greater focus in 2012, says Ryan Berg, cloud security strategy lead for IBM. The need to manage security among an increasingly mobile workforce, with many employees choosing to use their own personal devices, will also be a key concern in 2012, says Berg.
Posted February 23, 2012
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has announced new programs in the 2012 OAUG Educational Series, a virtual learning series of webinars offered exclusively to OAUG members. "OAUG members consistently report that education is one of the primary reasons for being a member," said Mark Clark, president of the OAUG. "The OAUG Educational Series is a prime example of how our organization continually serves its members by offering informative training events throughout the year to help them reap the most benefit from their Oracle investment."
Posted February 21, 2012
Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation, a provider of cloud-based talent management. Together, Oracle and Taleo intend to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers.
Posted February 15, 2012
Ntirety, Inc. announced that it has been successfully audited and certified under the MSPAlliance's (MSPA) Unified Certification Standard for Cloud and Managed Service Providers (UCS). The certification is specifically designed to provide business consumers of cloud and managed services with the assurance that the service provider they hire will meet or exceed the highest principles of quality in areas such as financial stability, facilities, managed services practices, and customer satisfaction.
Posted February 07, 2012
Oracle will be holding cloud computing conferences throughout North America, and around the globe, to share practical strategies for moving to the cloud.
Posted February 01, 2012
Savvis, a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has expanded its application performance management (APM) partnership with Compuware. Savvis joined the Compuware Partner Network in 2009 through an agreement to resell the Gomez SaaS Web performance management solution and offer it as part of its hosting platform to its clients. Savvis has now extended this partnership to include the Gomez on-premises APM product suite.
Posted January 23, 2012
Jaspersoft, a BI software provider, has announced the development of what it describes as the first BI architected for platform-as-a-service, with the planned integration of Jaspersoft BI with Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS. "With Jaspersoft's suite of reporting and analysis capabilities now available on OpenShift, organizations can quickly realize the benefits of the cloud while gaining deep insights from the data that powers these applications," says Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat.
Posted January 17, 2012
The argument that "everyone is doing it and you should too" holds no value for strategic decision-making in IT. Yet critical thinking often goes by the wayside when a hot, new trend catches on and it seems like the masses are following along. Cloud computing is certainly in vogue - most industry analysts are bullish on cloud computing adoption and anticipate enterprise spending to increase - but organizations need to steer clear of falling into the trap that moving to the cloud always delivers cost savings.
Posted January 11, 2012
Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.
Posted January 11, 2012
IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a provider of software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 1996, Green Hat is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Upon the acquisition close, Green Hat will join IBM's Rational Software business.
Posted January 04, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, a C, C++, and Fortran development platform for building fast, scalable enterprise applications for Oracle Solaris systems. According to Oracle, the new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications up to 300% by leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.
Posted January 04, 2012
The first calendar year following SAP's acquisition of Sybase is coming to a close. David Jonker, director, product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, Sybase, discusses key product integrations, IT trends that loom large in Sybase's data management strategies, and the emergence of what Sybase describes as DW 2.0. 2011 has been "a foundational year," with effort focused on making Sybase technologies work with SAP and setting the stage for 2012, says Jonker. "We believe 2012 is going to be a big year for us on the database side."
Posted December 21, 2011