Alex Williams

Alex Williams is an editor for SiliconAngle and lives a charmed life in Portland, Or.

Latest from Alex Williams

Apple Continues to Expand Enterprise Power Base

Apple’ expansion of its power base in the enterprise became readily apparent today at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference: According to 9 to 5 Mac Daily, Apple announced at WWDC it sold 26 million copies of Lion in only 9 months.  That is faster adoption than Windows 7. It’s apparent the iPad will continue to win ...

Larry – The Oracle Cloud Is Seven Years Old? If So, it Sure Looks Like It

Larry Ellison talked on stage today, squinting his eyes at a desktop and laptop screen to show the new social marketing tools Oracle has developed. I have so many questions after listening to Larry. My first question, though, is to all of us: How do you cut through this crap? I’ve heard the same inward ...

Why is Larry Ellison’s Twitter Account Featured on the Oracle.com Home Page?

The Oracle.com home page today features the Larry Ellison Twitter account with his picture, the Twitter icon and today’s date: 6/6/12. Larry Ellison Twitter has not updated his Twitter account but this may be the day he gets started. Speculation has been rampant all week. What will he tweet? Will he tweak a rival? Will he ...

Automation and Easier Aggregation in Hadoop Clusters Signals Data as a Service Trend

Yesterday I wrote about Cascading 2.0, an alternative to MapReduce. The application framework, managed by Concurrent, allows for developers to develop “Cascading,” big data apps using high-level scripting languages. The apps then get scheduled to run across a Hadoop cluster. Also yesterday,  HP executives presented their case for integrating Hadoop with Autonomy and HP Vertica, ...

On the Storage Battlefield, IBM and HP Fight to Get Their Mojo Back

Everyone wants to tell the world how much better they are than Amazon Web Services. HP has Meg Whitman on stage tomorrow under the big tent at HP Discover.  Larry Ellison will make his own proclamations this week when I expect he will provide a new version of cloud-in-a-box. This time though, I expect that ...

Cascading 2.0: An Application Framework for Hadoop Winning the Attention of Twitter, Etsy and EMC

Cascading is an open-source application framework getting the attention of Twitter, Etsy, AirBnB and big data analytics companies such as EMC Greemplum and Map R. The popularity stems from its ability to abstract the complexities of MapReduce and making Hadoop clusters easier to manage. Today Concurrent announced Cascading 2.0, an ennterprise-grade development platform designed for ...

Data Gravity in a Converged Infrastructure

VMware’s Dave McCrory created the concept of data gravity. It’s a way to show how data has a gravitational pull. Yesterday, I discovered a blog post by Steve Chambers, who works in the office of the CTO for VCE, the VMware, Cisco, EMC alliance. He uses McCrory’s theory to demonstrate how the conceept of data ...

Facebook to Chrome and Safari Users: “You Are Using a Browser We Do Not Support”

Facebook has a message on its site for people who use Google Chrome or the Apple Safari browser: You’re using a web browser we don’t support. Try one of these options to have a better experience on Facebook. The browsers Facebook does support: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. That’s interesting, huh? Facebook supports neither the ...

Google Chromebook and the new Chromebox: Another Node for a Services World

Google announced today its latest Chromebook, and a new Chromebox that continue to show that hardware increasingly represent nodes for an increasingly dominant services oriented world. It will soon be true that everything is a node. We won’t need desktops or laptops.  A device networked to a PC will simply become a device connected to the ...

HP, Dell and IBM Continue to Languish Compared to EMC and NetApp

HP, Dell and IBM continue to languish in the storage market when compared to the big guns such as EMC and NetApp. In a post on StorageNewsletter.com, Jean-Jacques Maleval writes that EMC, NetApp and Hitachi continue to grow fastest in the storage market. What’s striking to Maleval is the fact that these leaders have not seen the challenge ...