UPDATED 10:00 EDT / MAY 21 2015

NEWS

Enterprise headline roundup for May 21, 2015 – another healthcare hack

A daily summary of stories in the areas of Big Data, cloud computing and software-led infrastructure from some of the top news sources on the Web.

 

Business News

Health Insurer CareFirst Says It Was Hacked – Wall Street Journal

The breach occurred nearly a year and affected about 1.1 million members. Attackers may have stolen user names, member names, birth dates, email addresses and subscriber numbers, but no Social Security numbers, medical claims, employment, credit card or financial information was compromised. It’s the third time this year that a large health insurance company has reported a data breach. Computerworld reports There’s evidence that attackers used a well-known tactic of setting up slightly misspelled domain names to trick visitors into giving up credentials.

H-P to Sell 51 percent of Chinese Data-Networking Unit to Tsinghua Holdings – Wall Street Journal

Following reports that U.S. spying has curtailed Chinese demand for U.S. technology products, Hewlett-Packard co. is expected to announce today that Tsinghua Holdings will buy 51 percent of a newly created entity that includes HP’s H3C Technologies Co. networking operation together with its China-based server, data-storage and technology-services businesses. The Journal quotes sources as saying Tsinghua will pay about $2.3 billion for the stake.

NetApp will cut 500 jobs as part of restructuring plan – VentureBeat

The one-time high-flying storage appliance maker said it’ll lay off 500 of its 12,000 employees in the wake of a 32 percent drop in profits. NetApp is struggling with the trend toward customers putting more data in the cloud and buying less hardware as a result.

The clock is ticking for Dropbox – Business Insider

The company was valued at $10 billion in January, 2014 and investors are hoping it can maintain that valuation as it eyes an IPO. But there’s evidence that Dropbox for Business is under-performing expectations, and its annualized run rate is about 1/20th of its valuation. The company is in a transition as the cloud storage market races to the bottom.

Cisco is under scrutiny over Russia – Business Insider

BuzzFeed says it has evidence that Cisco skirted U.S. and EU sanctions. Cisco says it was just a clerical error.

Salesforce Revenue Outpaces Wall Street Views – Wall Street Journal

Revenue rose 23 percent to $1.51 billion for the quarter, beating expectations. The stock dropped about three percent, probably reflecting the company’s stratospheric $47 billion valuation. It’s impressive that Salesforce.com can continue to grow so robustly at its current size, though.

Extreme Networks restructures again, promises SDN pivot – The Register

With Ed Meyercord – Extreme’s sixth CEO in nine years – calling the latest quarter’s results “disappointing,” the company is restructuring again. Its 8-K form says it will trim its workforce by 18 percent in hopes of saving $40 million in fiscal 2016.

Lenovo’s profit hit by acquisitions of Motorola, IBM server business – Computerworld

Recent acquisitions have taken a bit out of earnings, with profits falling 37 percent. However, the hit was anticipated.

This startup raised $8M to replace your publication’s video team with robots – VentureBeat

More bad news for journalists: “Wibbitz takes text-based articles from publishers and generates video content using the publisher’s pictures, video clips, or licensed content. Then, by analyzing the written piece and its tone, the company lays out a script to be narrated by a human voice.”

Chromebook Sales Predicted to Grow 27 percent This Year, to 7.3M Units – TechCrunch

That’s up from the 5.7 million units Gartner estimates were shipped last year. Chromebooks remain primarily and education play, however. There hasn’t been much corporate adoption.

 

Product News

MemSQL makes its in-memory database available to all – Computerworld

MemSQL announced a new release and a free new Community Edition. Version 4 offers “real-time, distributed geospatial intelligence to make it easier for developers to add geolocation data into their applications,” writes Katherine Noyes. A new Spark Connector integrates with Apache Spark in-memory clusters and provides access to Spark’s rich programming environment. The bigger deal, though, may be the new Community Edition, which provides unlimited capacity and a full set of features.

Salesforce unwraps Community Cloud, the next generation – VentureBeat

The latest iteration of Community Cloud includes targeted recommendations, which suggest resources users should consult based on their previous activity. The additions are included as widgets built in the Salesforce1 Lightning PaaS framework. There are about two dozen widgets available now, but Mike Micucci, VP of products for Community Cloud, said there will soon be hundreds.

Intel wants containers to be alone again, naturally – The Register

The chip giant introduces “’Clear containers,’ which rely on the VT-x extensions in its chippery to enhance security and scalability. VT-x adds virtualization support to silicon, the better to let CPUs share their resources among virtual machines while also walling off VMs from one another.” Currently available only for KVM.

Social media: Socialbakers announces analytics, analytics, and more analytics (and Sina Weibo deal) – VentureBeat

Included in the latest release are a new Instagram analytics dashboard; integration between digital ads and analytics; video analytics on plays and completions across both Facebook and YouTube; analytics on China’s Sina Weibo social network; and paid post detection so brands can see which tactics are boosting ad visibility and how much brands are paying for them.

Google Maps update will add better traffic alerts, alternate route suggestions

Sounds a lot like Waze.

 

Trends & Analysis

Why Does Netflix Need a Hadoop Genie? – Forbes

Netflix likes to talk about how it uses Hadoop to mine oodles of data. It developed a project called Genie to match the jobs users want to run with the right Hadoop clusters. Dan Woods says the innovation addresses a key barrier to Hadoop adoption: matching workload to resources. Prospective Hadoop users should learn from Netflix’s approach (and perhaps Netflix could open-source Genie).

How Hadoop and in-memory analytics help make Candy Crush the world’s most addictive game – Information Age

King Digital Entertainment’s more than 195 games generate more than one petabyte of data per year and 1.5 billion game plays per day. Hadoop has been a great tool for determining, for example, that a lot of player were getting stuck on level 65 of Candy Crush, which demanded some tweaks to the game. Hadoop’s batch orientation didn’t enable King to make quick decisions. A massively parallel analytics engine was brought in to make it possible to run queries in seconds that used to take hours.

Photo by bykst vis Pixabay

 


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