Announcing Infrastructure Services GA and New Price Commitment Today is an exciting day for Microsoft, Windows Azure and all of our customers around the world. I am very pleased to announce the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. This new service now makes it possible for customers to move applications into the cloud. Our announcement today is a significant step in our cloud compu ...

Something is seriously wrong in Larry Land. Oracle does not command absolute control like it once did. You can see this clearly with the earnings the company posted last week and the growth that startups like Datastax are witnessing as more customers seek alternative databases for online applications. Until this past week, the extent of Oracle’s problems were not known. But there is a cut, a slight bleeding ...

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 11, 2013 — More than 75 percent of midsize to large businesses are implementing big data-related solutions within the next 12 months — with customer care, marketing and sales departments increasingly driving demand, according to new Microsoft Corp. research released today. via Customers Rapidly Adopting Big Data Solutions — Driven By Marketing, Sales and More — Reports New Microsoft Re ...

There's a lot more to Microsoft's big data strategy than a Hadoop partnership with Hortonworks. In fact, Hadoop is just the beginning of what Microsoft Technical Fellow Dave Campbell describes as "an information production line." You don't hear much about Microsoft in the big data market, but the company wants the world to know it has big plans. In fact, it's living big data through its Bing search engine, ...

As Big Data and real-time insights are becoming significant for enterprises around the world, we can see a lot of developments going around in this domain. Recently, IBM unveiled new software and services to help clients more effectively gain competitive insight, optimize infrastructure and better manage resources to address Internet-scale data. The company has announced a whopping investment of $100 millio ...

Ahh, the POC. It’s like test-driving a car, except the salesperson is doing everything in their power to keep you from touching the wheel. In my previous post, I discussed the fact that in today’s market, there isn’t a single Big Data vendor whose product does everything. Each vendor has their strengths, and each vendor has their weaknesses. With sales reps doing everything in their power to keep you from d ...

We are very excited to share with you that today we announced our company, Aster Data, is being acquired by Teradata, who as you all know commands the #1 position in data warehousing. Together, we will tackle the massive opportunity in the big data and big data analytics market. Upon close, Aster Data will become part of the Teradata organization and our products will become part of the Teradata family of p ...

There is a lot of buzz around Big Data and the NOSQL movement these days and rightly so. The issues with data have essentially been two-fold: find cost effective ways to store ever increasing amounts of data and information, and find ways to mine this information to extract meaningful Business Intelligence. This problem has been compounded by the emergence of web 2.0 technologies whose legion of loyal fans ...

It’s ironic how all of a sudden Vertica is changing its focus from being a column-only database to claiming to be an Analytic Platform. If you’ve used an Analytic Platform you know it’s more than just bolting in a layer of analytic functions on top of a database. But that’s how Vertica claims it’s now a full-blown analytic platform when in fact their analytics capability is rather thin. For instance, their ...

One of the coolest parts of my job is seeing how companies use analytics to drive their business. The term “big data” has become somewhat of a superstar in the world of analytics recently, but it’s also the complexity and richness of the insights from that data which make it a “big data” challenge for companies to tackle with traditional data management infrastructures. It’s not just size that matters – it’ ...