Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing, and IBM Netezza announced they are teaming up to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin Data Warehouse Appliance. According to the vendors, this will enable customers to directly leverage the capabilities of the open source R statistics language as they run high-performance predictive analytics from within data warehouse platforms.
Posted March 21, 2011
Cloud.com announced the latest version of an open source cloud computing platform intended to help manage highly-scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. The new release, CloudStack 2.2, is a foundation designed to enable data center operators to build on-demand, elastic cloud services within their existing IT infrastructures.
Posted March 21, 2011
CiRBA Inc. says it is shipping a new release of its data center intelligence software, designed to provide IT organizations with "fully-loaded utilization," a new metric for measuring the infrastructure efficiency. CiRBA Version 6.1's fully-loaded utilization feature provides a precise and simultaneous measurement of server infrastructure requirements that factors in utilization patterns, technical constraints and business and operational policies. Leveraging this measure, organizations can identify exactly how much infrastructure is required to safely service workloads, allowing excess capacity to be accurately measured and reclaimed for other purposes, according to the vendor. According to Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, data centers can face challenges in understanding how efficiently and how well utilized their IT and virtualized environments are running. This is because they tend to rely solely on traditional measurements such as CPU utilization, I/O rates and other measurements. But these can be misleading, he says.
Posted March 21, 2011
On the heels of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated the capability to understand natural language, IBM launched a global skills initiative to educate clients, business partners, and college students on how to use IBM business analytics and information management software, and many of the underlying technologies of the Watson computing system, to capture information from new sources and use it to create business opportunities.
Posted March 21, 2011
IBM has announced new software and the creation a new consulting practice dedicated to the emerging category of "Smarter Commerce," focused on helping companies adapt to rising customer demands in today's digitally transformed marketplace. The new software and services offerings, supported by global sales and marketing resources, will address the spectrum of enterprise commerce activities - new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks. "It's a buyer's world now," says Craig Hayman, general manager of IBM Industry Solutions. "Businesses require a tighter and highly responsive network of suppliers and partners to ensure they deliver the right product or service at the right price, time and place. The key to business success in this unfolding environment is predicting trends and automating market responses in advance to eliminate the gaps between buy and sell, supply and demand."
Posted March 21, 2011
Despite highly publicized data breaches, ranging from the loss of personally identifiable information such as credit card and Social Security numbers at major corporations to the WikiLeaks scandal involving sensitive U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. State Department information, and the "alphabet soup" of compliance regulations, data around the globe remains at grave risk, according to John Ottman, president and CEO of Application Security, Inc., who has written "Save the Database, Save the World" to focus attention on the problem and present steps to its solution. While super secure networks are important, that alone is far from enough and a layered data security strategy with a commitment to "protecting data where it lives - in the database" must be pursued to avoid risks posed by outside hackers as well as authorized users, says Ottman. A stronger government hand may be needed as well to defend "the critical infrastructure that operates in the private sector," he suggests.
Posted March 17, 2011
OpenSpan, Inc., a provider of user process management software, announced it has released support for Oracle Complex Event Processing (CEP), a solution for building applications to filter, correlate and process events in real time so that downstream applications, service-oriented architectures and event-driven architectures are driven by real-time intelligence. The new support enables OpenSpan and Oracle CEP to be used together to monitor user activity to detect and prevent fraud and compliance risks or identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
Posted March 16, 2011
Furthering its support for Java-based mobile development, Oracle has announced Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile Client, an extension of the Oracle Application Development Framework. A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle ADF Mobile Client allows developers to extend their existing skills into mobile devices. It simplifies application creation and deployment using a single, standard Java user interface (UI) framework and tooling for all supported devices. Developers can build once and deploy to multiple devices - and as support for new devices is added in Oracle ADF Mobile Client, applications can be deployed to the new platforms without redevelopment. "It is all about linking the enterprise and mobile devices," Duncan Mills, senior director of product management for Oracle Fusion, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The approach takes Oracle's existing philosophy of "a single set of development skills, broadening the envelope to include native mobile applications which can run online and offline, and then managing all of the tricky data synchronization tasks on top of that."
Posted March 16, 2011
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
Posted March 16, 2011
Oracle has announced that an update to MySQL 5.5 Enterprise Edition is now available. New in this release is the addition of MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Workbench along with enhancements in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. In addition, recent integration with MyOracle Support allows MySQL customers to access the same support infrastructure used for Oracle Database customers to enable joint MySQL and Oracle customers to experience faster problem resolution by using a common technical support interface.
Posted March 16, 2011
Fuzzy Logix, LLC, a provider of advanced analytical solutions, has announced the availability of in-database analytics working with IBM Informix database software to serve the large base of customers who are seeking to use easily accessible analytics to gain competitive advantage. The product, DB Lytix, is a rich, in-database analytics library built during more than eleven years of extensive research on advanced analytical methods. It contains functions for mathematical and statistical analysis, data mining, and Monte Carlo simulations. With the library now ported to IBM Informix, DB Lytix can leverage the high performance of Informix to bring gains in processing speed to analytic solutions.
Posted March 15, 2011
Red Gate Software has added the ability to source control data to SQL Source Control, providing a complete tool for source controlling all database elements from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SQL Source Control connects users' existing source control systems - either Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Subversion (SVN) - to SQL Server. In addition to providing source control for both static data and database schema, SQL Source Control 2.0 supports a shared model that allows development team members to see each other's database changes in real time. This complements the dedicated model introduced in V1.0 last summer.
Posted March 15, 2011
ExtraHop Networks, a provider of network and application performance management solutions, announced it now supports IBM's DB2 database. The addition of DB2 rounds out ExtraHop's support for the top three providers, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. ExtraHop customers now will be able to monitor database transactions in real time without having to run invasive tools such as SQL profilers and agents, which tend to degrade performance. With the addition of DB2, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system now "covers just about every major relational database that we've encountered within an enterprise IT environment," Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted March 15, 2011
Cloud.com today announced CloudStack 2.2, the latest version of its open source cloud computing platform. CloudStack is an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of scalable public and private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds. Using CloudStack as the foundation, data center operators can build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. CloudStack is available for immediate download from the open source cloud computing community.
Posted March 15, 2011
On the heels of the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge, in which the IBM Watson system demonstrated the capability to understand natural language, IBM has launched a global skills initiative to educate clients, business partners, and college students on how to use IBM business analytics and information management software, and many of the underlying technologies of the Watson computing system, to capture information from new sources and use it to create business opportunities.
Posted March 15, 2011
ScaleBase is seeking 50 additional customers to participate in an expanded private beta program for the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, which enables multiple database servers to work like a single database. The ScaleBase private beta was first announced on January 1, and since then dozens of customers have registered for the program. The company is now seeking additional users of MySQL on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS who would like to try the technology.
Posted March 15, 2011
Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing, and IBM Netezza have announced a partnership to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin Data Warehouse Appliance. According to the vendors, this will enable customers seeking to run high performance and full-scale predictive analytics from within a data warehouse platform to directly leverage the capabilities of the open source R statistics language. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will work together to create a version of Revolution's software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza's i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion. General availability of this integrated solution is currently planned for later this year.
Posted March 15, 2011
Unisys has announced that its French subsidiary has signed a multi-year contract to provide end-user IT support services for 60,000 employees of Air France and its subsidiaries at multiple locations throughout France. Under the terms of the contract, Unisys will handle IT equipment procurement and software distribution for those employees. Unisys will also provide a range of hardware installation, maintenance and support services for 23,000 devices distributed across 10 airports and other locations in France.
Posted March 09, 2011
Unisys has announced that its New Zealand subsidiary has been selected to provide Unisys Stealth Solution data protection technology to car rental company Hertz New Zealand to help secure and protect Hertz customers' credit card data against fraud. The Unisys Stealth Solution uses data encryption and bit-splitting technology to secure data. Using the Stealth Solution, organizations can define communities of interest - specific groups of users - and segregate access to data on a shared network or storage system so that one community of interest cannot access another's data.
Posted March 09, 2011
UNITE, the volunteer-based organization of Unisys users from around the world, has announced that the agenda for the 2011 Annual UNITE Technology Conference and Exhibition is now available on the UNITE website. The event will be held May 22-25, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove, California. The theme for this year's conference is "Innovation - Solving Today's Business Problems with Solutions That Keep the World Moving." As in previous years, conference tracks will include BIS, OS 2200, MCP, and EAE.
Posted March 09, 2011
Cloud and Hadoop - Keys to a Perfect Marriage Explored in New DBTA Webcast On-Demand
Posted March 09, 2011
Unisys has announced the Application Modernization Platform as a Service (AMPS) offering, a subscription-based service to help federal government agencies reduce the cost, complexity, risk and time of modernizing their legacy software applications. The platform, managed and monitored by Unisys, can be implemented via a cloud infrastructure or hosted onsite, enabling federal organizations to shorten the time associated with typical enterprise platform integration and procurement.
Posted March 09, 2011
Following the recent introductions of DB PowerStudio for Oracle, and DB PowerStudio for SQL Server, Embarcadero is now equipping Sybase ASE developers and DBAs with a toolset to simplify their development, database administration and performance tuning tasks. The new DB PowerStudio for Sybase ASE combines several of Embarcadero's most popular database tools into an aggressively priced suite. The toolset helps Sybase ASE professionals boost productivity by eliminating time-consuming development and administration tasks, while also improving the performance and availability of their databases.
Posted March 08, 2011
Precise, a provider of transaction performance management software, has announced the availability of Precise 9.0. "The focus of this release is real-time transaction performance management for cloud applications and especially Java applications running on the cloud," Precise executive vice president Zohar Gilad tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The old problems that prevent applications from scaling don't go away, and a new virtualization layer actually makes it a lot more difficult to find the origin of a problem once it happens," says Gilad. Additionally, he notes, "The cloud model is heavily dependent upon shared services which is a good thing, but the flip side of that is that you have a lot more possibilities for application contention on resources."
Posted March 08, 2011
Cloud and Hadoop - Keys to a Perfect Marriage Explored in New DBTA Webcast On-Demand
Posted March 08, 2011
A member of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) since 1992, Mark C. Clark recently took over as president of the organization. Recently, 5 Minute Briefing chatted with Clark about what's in store for members at the annual Oracle users conference COLLABORATE as well as for the year ahead. Helping members prepare for an upgrade to Oracle Applications Release 12, providing additional smaller, more targeted regional events, and a continued emphasis on a return to the basics with networking and education are at the top of his to-do list for 2011.
Posted March 08, 2011
Teradata Corporation, which already had an 11% ownership interest in Aster Data Systems, Inc, has signed a definitive agreement to pay $263 million for the remaining ownership interest in the company. Aster Data is a provider of software for advanced analytics and the management of a variety of diverse data that is not structured. The combination of Teradata and Aster Data technologies will enable businesses to unlock the new intelligence within the burgeoning volumes of big data. "Teradata is recognized as an innovator and leader in data warehousing, and the addition of Aster Data will enable us to leapfrog into a leadership position in the emerging big data market. This is a great opportunity and something our customers have been asking for," said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation.
Posted March 08, 2011
Are today's IT college graduates entering the workforce with the right sets of skills that companies now so critically need? Or is additional training required? In a new survey of 376 employers, a majority report they depend on the educational sector - universities and colleges - to provide specific IT skills, such as enterprise programming languages, as well as business skills such as problem-solving andcommunications. However, few companies are entirely satisfied with the readiness of graduates coming out of campuses. These are the results of a new survey fielded among SHARE members, as well as subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey, sponsored by IBM and conducted in January 2011 by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., included the perspectives of IT managers and professionals in organizations with highly diverse IT infrastructures.
Posted March 07, 2011
Novell has announced the availability of SUSE Manager, a solution for managing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux across physical, virtual and cloud environments. SUSE Manager is intended to reduce the total cost of ownership of Linux deployments, even as they become larger and more sophisticated. According to Novell, SUSE Manager also simplifies migrations from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Posted March 07, 2011
HP has announced enhancements to the HP TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine (RepDV) service that protects enterprises from the latest security risks by providing greater visibility into malicious activity on corporate networks. HP TippingPoint launched the Rep DV service last June to deliver current lists of malicious or suspicious websites to customer-deployed TippingPoint IPS solutions and automatically block traffic to and from these sites. The list is updated every 2 hours and is powered by HP's Digital Vaccine Labs (DVLabs), a security research and development organization.
Posted March 07, 2011
AES, a virtualization infrastructure provider, announced a new solution that provides virtual network performance monitoring for Linux on System z, in real time, as well as alerting capabilities that can be integrated with other system management software. The new offering, CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux, offers a focal point for the health of all Linux nodes and application performance monitoring, as well as intelligent diagnostic capabilities for specific IP-addressable resources, such as devices, links, routes, connections, and nodes, within the virtualized environment.
Posted March 07, 2011
Software AG launched a complementary collection of products and services designed specifically to align business and IT concerns. The vendor's process-driven IT modernization solution - which leverages the webMethods SOA registry and ARIS business process management suite - is intended to be a holistic, process-centric solution that adds a new process intelligence framework and best practices as well as specific targeted services.
Posted March 07, 2011
Oracle has announced that performance testing with Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management running on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine has delivered outstanding results for calculating profitability measures at extreme speed. Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management running on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine computed profitability for 172 allocation rules across 250 million accounts and more than 1 billion transactions in only 4 hours and 45 minutes.
Posted March 02, 2011
Oracle has announced Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Release 3.1, a comprehensive update with the first releases of AIA pre-built integrations based on and certified for industry-leading Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Release 3.1 includes nine cross-industry Process Integration Packs (PIP), eight vertical PIPs, and two direct integrations certified for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. "They are really meant to be accelerators," says Tim Hall, senior director of Oracle's product management, Application Integration, of the prebuilt integrations. They are intended to overcome common issues that customers will face when they are doing integration between applications, "and these things are not unique to Oracle; they are industry challenges," he explains.
Posted March 02, 2011
LogLogic, an IT data management company supporting log management and SIEM (security information and event management), has announced the release of LogLogic Database Security Manager 4.1. LogLogic Database Security Manager is used by enterprises to ensure the security of their database deployments, while also allowing for the remote monitoring of activity without the need for built-in database auditing features. Database Security Manager includes a rule-base and management dashboard, and is part of LogLogic's Universal Collection Framework providing the ability to get any IT data, regardless of format or location.
Posted March 02, 2011
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has announced two new product families to bring the benefits of data virtualization to ETL (extract, transform and load). According to Queplix, the VirtualETL and CloudETL families simplify the ETL process, enabling users to configure Queplix's Application Software Blades, providing easy connections to target applications and reducing the time required to integrate applications. The VirtualETL family includes enterprise-class VirtualETL, which allows ETL teams to connect any two enterprise applications together, and professional-class VirtualETL, which allows users to connect any two applications that use relational database management systems. With CloudETL, users can connect any two cloud-based applications or connect a cloud-based application with one that is on-premise.
Posted March 02, 2011
LogLogic, an IT data management company supporting log management and SIEM (security information and event management), has announced the release of LogLogic Database Security Manager 4.1. LogLogic Database Security Manager is used by enterprises to ensure the security of their database deployments, while also allowing for the remote monitoring of activity without the need for built-in database auditing features. Database Security Manager includes a rule-base and management dashboard, and is part of LogLogic's Universal Collection Framework providing the ability to get any IT data, regardless of format or location.
Posted March 01, 2011
Membase (formerly NorthScale) and CouchOne have joined forces to create Couchbase, a provider of an end-to-end family of NoSQL database products. The merger will enable a lineup of data management capabilities built with Apache CouchDB document database technology, memcached distributed caching technology and the Membase data flow and cluster management system.
Posted March 01, 2011
Composite Software, a data virtualization vendor, says it is joining with Clarity Resource Group, a business intelligence (BI) consulting firm, to offer data virtualization products and services that increase BI agility in financial services, communications, retail, health care and energy industries.
Posted March 01, 2011
InetSoft Technology, a provider of dashboard, reporting and mashup solutions, has announced a new release of its flagship business intelligence software application, Style Intelligence. The new release aims to expands upon InetSoft's concept of agile BI, with several feature enhancements that will allow developers and administrators to work more efficiently and nimbly.
Posted March 01, 2011
Luminex Software, Inc., a developer and provider of disk-based mainframe virtual tape products and technologies, announced at the SHARE IBM User Group conference in Anaheim, an enhanced version of its Channel Gateway mainframe virtual tape product that the company says outperforms other industry solutions by 2x to 5x or more. The new Channel Gateway "X" version provides near link-speed virtual tape performance, allowing data centers to meet their maximum mainframe host tape I/O capabilities using disk-based storage.
Posted March 01, 2011
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization solutions, has announced two new product families to bring the benefits of data virtualization to ETL (extract, transform and load). According to Queplix, the VirtualETL and CloudETL families simplify the ETL process, enabling users to configure Queplix's Application Software Blades, providing easy connections to target applications and reducing the time required to integrate applications. The VirtualETL family includes enterprise-class VirtualETL, which allows ETL teams to connect any two enterprise applications together, and professional-class VirtualETL, which allows users to connect any two applications that use relational database management systems. With CloudETL, users can connect any two cloud-based applications or connect a cloud-based application with one that is on-premise.
Posted March 01, 2011
CA Erwin Data Modeler r8, a solution for collaboratively visualizing and managing data across multiple systems, was announced by CA Technologies. Enhanced visualization and different ways to visualize data models in non-traditional formats is a main theme of the release, Donna Burbank, senior director of marketing, Data Management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The goal is to help ERwin, an established product with a 20-plus-year track record, to reach new audiences, in particular, business and non-technical users, as well as to provide improved workflow for traditional CA Erwin Data Modeler users.
Posted February 23, 2011
To help organizations prevent internal and external attacks from reaching their enterprise database targets, Oracle has introduced Oracle Database Firewall, which is intended to act as the "first line of defense for databases." According to Oracle, the new software solution monitors database activity on the network to help prevent unauthorized access, SQL injections, privilege or role escalation, and other external and internal attacks in real time. "In the same way that most companies have deployed network firewalls to stop intruders from coming into their data centers," Vipin Samar, vice president of Database Security, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing, "Oracle Database Firewall is blocking unauthorized traffic from getting to the database itself."
Posted February 23, 2011
Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has announced its partnership with Commercialbank of Qatar, the largest private sector bank in Qatar, for the launch of a comprehensive mobile banking and mobile payments service for its retail customers.
Posted February 23, 2011
Revelation Software has announced the availability of the latest release of OpenInsight Development Suite (OI), version 9.2.1, which features OpenInsight for Web v.1.1. (O4W), a new version of the web 2.0 development toolkit that enables OpenInsight and MultiValue developers to rapidly create browser based forms, reports, menus, dashboards and programs.
Posted February 23, 2011
BlueFinity International will demonstrate how to create a simple SSIS transformation to move MultiValue data into MS SQL Server using mv.SSIS in a free webinar on Tuesday, March 1.
Posted February 23, 2011
Marc Kahn Software LLC has announced the product launch of the Multi-Value Phantom Job Processor (MVPJP). According to the company, MVPJP helps to increase the efficiency of operations by scheduling and automating jobs to be run in the background. It runs as an application within a MultiValue database environment and is designed to be managed by non-technical personnel.
Posted February 23, 2011
CA Technologies says it is now shipping a toolset for collaboratively visualizing and managing data across multiple systems. The product, CA Erwin Data Modeler r8, offers enhanced visualization and different ways to visualize data models in non-traditional formats. "We completely ripped out our old user interface and put in a new one," Donna Burbank, senior director of marketing, Data Management, CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. With features like graphics, themes, fonts, and auto layout, she observes, "It is really more like a drawing tool on the front with the power of a data modeling tool behind it."
Posted February 22, 2011
FalconStor Software, a provider of data protection solutions, is now offering a disaster recovery (DR) automation tool as part of its FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) product line.
Posted February 22, 2011