I’ve been working on a big idea for several months.  The genesis of that idea was an internal collaboration about the future of enterprise suites versus business process management suites (BPMS). We actually had a mock debate about the future of these two software categories and asked: Will enterprise suites, like CRM and ERP, dominate in 2015? Or will BPM suites come on strong by 2015 and displace them as ...

I was laying awake early this morning thinking about Oracle. Back when it was starting its $20 billion buying spree of companies in 2006, analysts all said the strategy would fail. There were a lot of compelling arguments why. People said that the assets of a software company are the engineers and the engineers would go elsewhere. People argued that Oracle fundamentally didn’t know how to write good applica ...

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open-source statistical modeling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It announced a new Advanced Analytics product on Wednesday that ties R to its database and family of software-hardware appliances. Oracle Advanced Analytics consists of Oracle R Enterprise, along with the vendor's exi ...

It looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, said it’s getting into the big data game. A new division within Cray, called YarcData, will leverage Cray’s experience working within data-intensive environments for customers such as Boeing in order to woo ...

Forrester published its first-ever Wave report for the emerging Hadoop market late last week and the results were surprising, both in terms of the "leaders wave" assessment and the absence of big vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle, and Teradata. The first surprise in "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012" report is that it includes such a wide variety of vendors. In the "leaders" wave ...

In one of my recent projects, I had to load product data from a CSV file into HBase and also to index it for search purpose.. I decided to separate out the loader part of the project as a stand alone tool and make available as open source. Currently, it’s hosted in github. It supports HBase. I will be adding support for Cassandra soon. I am working on Solr indexing right now. Introduction The tool is very g ...

A decade ago, the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) stack began to transform web startup economics. As new open-source webservers, databases, and web-friendly programming languages liberated developers from proprietary software and big iron hardware, startup costs plummeted. This lowered the barrier to entry, changed the startup funding game, and led to the emergence of the current Angel/S ...

Is the day of reckoning for big data upon us? To many observers, the growth in data is nothing short of incomprehensible. Data is streaming into, out of, and through enterprises from a dizzying array of sources-transactions, remote devices, partner sites, websites, and nonstop user-generated content. Not only are the data stores resulting from this information driving databases to scale into the terabyte an ...

German software vendor Software AG has bought San Francisco-based Java-performance expert Terracotta with the goal of creating a cloud application platform to rival those from Software AG competitors such as Oracle, VMware and IBM. Unlike many competitive efforts, however, Software AG will rely heavily on the open source products that Terracotta has built and bought over the past several years. We’ve covere ...

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 ...