DBTA E-EDITION
March 2012 - UPDATE
Subscribe to the online version of Database Trends and Applications magazine. DBTA will send occasional notices about new and/or updated DBTA.com content.
Trends and Applications
Social media business intelligence is on the rise, according to a new Unisphere Research study sponsored by IBM and Marist College. The study found that while social media monitoring and analysis is in its early stages, many organizations plan to monitor, collect, stage and analyze this data over the next 1 to 5 years and. In particular, LOB respondents, who are closer to customers, show appreciation for the benefits of monitoring SMNs.
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.
MarkLogic Corporation has joined the technology partner program of Hortonworks, a leading vendor promoting the development and support of Apache Hadoop. According to the vendors, by leveraging MarkLogic and Hortonworks, organizations will be able to seamlessly combine the power of MapReduce with MarkLogic's real-time, interactive analysis and indexing on a single, unified platform. There are two main reasons that MarkLogic has chosen to partner with Hortonworks, says Justin Makeig, senior product manager at MarkLogic. One is Hortenworks' extensive experience with Hadoop installations and the second is that its core product is 100% open source.
Novell announced an update to its ZENworks suite, which includes integrated Mac device management, and full disk encryption capabilities. ZENworks 11 Support Pack 2 enables customers to lock out threats without shutting down IT access, the vendor says. ZENworks 11 now offers a more holistic approach to supporting Mac devices in the enterprise. With this release, Mac support is provided through Remote Management for Mac, Asset Management for Mac, Mac OSX Patching and Mac Bundles.
Pentaho Corporation, an open source business analytics company, has formed a strategic partnership with DataStax, a provider of big data solutions built upon the Apache Cassandra project, a high performance NoSQL database. The relationship will provide native integration between Pentaho Kettle and Apache Cassandra. This will merge the scalable, low-latency performance of Cassandra with Kettle's visual interface for high-performance ETL, as well as integrated reporting, visualization and interactive analysis capabilities. According to the companies, organizations seeking to leverage their big data have found it difficult to implement and employ analytics technologies. "One of the big challenges today is ease of use of these tools," says Ian Fyfe, Pentaho's chief technology evangelist. Often built on open source projects, it "takes a lot of deep skills to use these systems, and these are skills that are hard to find," he explains.