Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying, "What's dangerous is to not evolve." His company has followed this mantra to the point where you can't tell any more if Amazon is a retail, media, or tech company. Organizations must follow Bezos' advice when it comes to evolving their digital analytics efforts or choose to live dangerously in an increasingly data-driven world.
Posted July 08, 2015
Midstate Mutual Insurance Company provides property and casualty insurance in New York State, through insurance products that are sold exclusively through independent agencies located throughout upstate New York. To meet escalating information technology requirements and stay successful, Midstate, a longtime Revelation Software customer, has evolved to offer online access at any time, and from any device through separate, dedicated portals for agents and customers.
Posted July 08, 2015
What matters most in data management in 2015? There are a lot of moving parts that data managers and professionals need to attend to in today's enterprises. Databases need to be wide open and accessible to all parts of the business, but at the same time, secure and free of tampering. Unstructured forms of data—such as log data, documents, graphics, video, and social data—need to be prepared and ready for analysis in the same way structured files have been ready for years.
Posted June 25, 2015
Nowadays, data moves well beyond the data center—as well as beyond corporate walls. The challenge is to support data as it moves from data center to cloud, from cloud to cloud, and from cloud to data center. This issue was explored in a recent survey conducted by Unisphere Research among the members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).
Posted June 25, 2015
Software is "eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in The Wall Street Journal. Companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Pandora have upended the retail, video, and music industries by operating, at their heart, as software-based companies. A software-defined approach to enterprise storage has begun to infiltrate the enterprise data center as well.
Posted June 25, 2015
Numerous studies over the past few years characterize generally poor performance in the success rate of business intelligence projects. Now is the time to move business intelligence practices into the 21st century, or risk a continued cycle of overspending and underperformance. Here are five new strategies to improve alignment between unique problem characteristics and specific strengths.
Posted June 25, 2015
If a data center fails, so could the business. It is hardly surprising then, to see the results of a recent survey which named the top management issue as availability. To allay this concern, and to meet customer expectations of an always-available data center, operators are deploying technologies that marry availability with optimized efficiency. Central to this outcome are database and software integrations.
Posted June 25, 2015
An ever increasing number organizations are implementing DevOps using continuous delivery process. They are fueled by reports of the benefits, which include quicker time to market, reduced costs and higher quality products. DevOps is mostly about organizational culture, while continuous delivery and continuous integrations are mainly about automation and tests, which of course require a trustworthy source control.
Posted June 09, 2015
Rackspace is launching a dedicated option for MongoDB customers called ObjectRocket for MongoDB databases. The solution, which combines the speed and scalability of the ObjectRocket platform with dedicated hardware and networking for compliance-dependent use cases is aimed at providing the the performance, security and compliance required in high-risk industries such as healthcare, financial services and insurance. "Today we're announcing a fully dedicated cabinet solution to provide a high level of isolation for our customers," said Chris Lalonde, co-founder of ObjectRocket. "On top of that, we are also announcing an on disk encryption for MongoDB."
Posted June 09, 2015
One day, corporations awoke to the fact that having data was not the same thing as having believable data. They awoke to discover the meaning of "data integrity." That was the day the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) was born. With an EDW, corporations had the bedrock data on which to make important and trustworthy decisions. Prior to the EDW, corporations had plenty of data, but the data was not believable.
Posted June 09, 2015
DBTA 100 2015 - The Companies That Matter Most in Data
Posted June 01, 2015
New and emerging companies are taking aim at data management challenges to help customers get more value from their data. Here, DBTA showcases the approaches of 10 companies we think are worth watching.
Posted June 01, 2015
Today, it's not enough for companies to collect as much data as possible in the hope of gleaning insight. Much of this information is useless and only serves to bog down corporate networks. Instead, companies need to focus on data integration and the ability to make the right data available to the right users, regardless of origin or platform. Here are 6 technologies to improve data integration.
Posted May 26, 2015
The end of life date for Windows Server 2003 is July 14, 2015. While the latest version of the operating system is now 10 years old, as of last summer more than 22 million servers around the world were still running production applications. Within the next few weeks, millions of enterprise IT professionals will be forced to decide if they are going to migrate off the OS or secure a custom support contract with Microsoft to manage the end-of-life OS.
Posted May 26, 2015
OpenStack turns five this year, and the project has come a long way in its short life so far. Last year brought major improvements in areas such as upgradeability between versions and overall usability, which upped the appeal of OpenStack to enterprises while also netting important backers such as HP (acquired private cloud vendor and one-time OpenStack competitor Eucalyptus) and VMware (OpenStack was a recurring theme at VMworld 2014).
Posted May 26, 2015
At Data Summit 2015 in New York City, Tony Shan, chief architect, Wipro, gave a talk on the key components of a successful big data methodology and shared lessons learned from real world big data implementations. According to Shan, there is an 8-step process for a big data framework with specific techniques and methods.
Posted May 26, 2015
To transform data into value, IT must move from thinking about what it does to data, and instead focus on business outcomes and what can be done with the data to advance the business, according to Edd Dumbill, vice president, strategy, Silicon Valley Data Science, who gave the welcome keynote at Data Summit 2015.
Posted May 14, 2015
These days, managing a data center can be like working inside a pressure cooker. Virtualization, dynamic computing, cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things—each major development turns up the heat, but budgets, staff, and skills often lag behind explosive growth in data center scale and complexity.
Posted May 14, 2015
Microsoft SQL Server has become a business-critical database for a growing number of enterprises that rely on it to run a wide range of essential business processes. As enterprises look to continuously improve the efficiency of their data centers, they face the challenges involved in improving their ability to provide high availability and disaster protection for SQL Server.
Posted May 14, 2015
The future will flourish with machines. We've been told this in pop culture for decades, from the helpful robots of the Jetsons, to the infamous Skynet of the Terminator movies, to the omniscient "computer" of Star Trek. Smart, connected devices will be ubiquitous and it's up to us, the humans, to decide what's next. But the Internet of Things (IoT) is about more than devices and data.
Posted April 23, 2015
SUSE and Veristorm are partnering to provide certified high-performance Hadoop solutions that run directly on Linux on IBM z Systems, IBM Power Systems, and x86-64. Customers with IBM z Systems can team SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z with Veristorm zDoop, a commercial distribution of Hadoop supported on mainframes.
Posted April 23, 2015
Many DBAs are now tasked with managing multi-vendor environments, and handling a variety of data types. Increasingly, DBAs are turning to strategies such as database automation to be able to concentrate more on the big picture of moving their enterprises forward.
Posted April 23, 2015
There are actually many advantages to adopting or subscribing to a cloud-based data services infrastructure. For starters—and this may be the only reason companies need to make the move—there's the simplicity cloud and data as a service can offer. In many ways, cloud and data as a service free enterprises and their data teams from the technical intricacies of deploying systems and solutions.
Posted April 06, 2015