SiliconANGLE

Google Knowledge Graph Means Smarter, Data-Driven Searches

Matt Weinberger — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:42:25 +0000

Today, Google unveiled the Google Knowledge Graph, an enhancement to the search engine that gives it the brains to tell the differences and relationships between places, people and things – to use Google’s own example, the difference between Taj Mahal, the famous landmark, and Taj Mahal, the musician. As Google Senior VP of Engineering Amit Singhal put it in a blog entry, Knowledge Graph is about searching for “things, not strings.”

Understanding that kind of ambiguity is powerful enough, but Google’s also leveraging Knowledge Graph to give users better summaries of their search terms: Again using Google’s example, a search for Marie Curie will return a brief overview of her life and times rather than just the dates she lived. It also draws connections between a searched term and other, related people, places and, well, things.

This may sound like a big data solution to you, and you’d be right. Singhal writes that Knowledge Graph uses 500 million data objects and 3.5 billion facts and relationships, with most of that information drawn from publicly-available sources like Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. Of course, Google being Google, Singhal promises that the search giant will fine-tune it based on what people search for, and whatever other data it can scrape from the web. And just like with an enterprise big data solution, Google is hoping that end users can draw useful insights from the data it correlates.

Google’s doing a phased rollout of Knowledge Graph results, and it may take some time before you see the new features. Once you get it, though, you’ll be able to click between different interpretations of your search string in the lower left-hand corner.

This is a good example of how Google’s flexible architecture enables it to add new, more cutting-edge technologies to its cloud without having to reinvent the wheel. At a time when “continuous deployment” is the watchword in the DevOps space, and service providers look to integrate big data as business value adds, Google’s managed to do both in an impressive display of service flexibility. Google’s overall cloud strategy may still be in considerable question, but the strength of its technology shouldn’t be.

On a similar note, yesterday, Google launched a Research Pane for Google Docs which enables inline web searches, with data drawn from the Google ecosystem, and the ability to include said data directly in the document with footnotes. For Google, it’s about convergence – convergence of your data and its data, as per its recent privacy policy shift, for better or for worse.

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In the same vein:

SAP Annnounces Free HANA Developer Images on Amazon Web Services

Alex Williams — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:19:37 +0000

Over the past week, SAP and Amazon Web Services announced a number of alliances. Earlier this week, SAP said they would sell Afaria, its mobile management software, on the AWS Marketplace. Last Friday, SAP and AWS announced that SAP customers can now deploy their SAP solutions on SAP EC2 instances in production and non-production environments for both Linux and Windows environments.

Now comes the news that developers may now set up a HANA database on Amazon Web Services at no cost. This is huge. HANA is the in-memory database that SAP is positioning to compete directly with Oracle and SAP.

It’s a major coup for the SAP Mentor community, and people like Vijay Vijayasankar, John Applebee, Jon Reed and Dennis Howlett, who have been pushing SAP for the past two years to take this kind of step.

It’s noteworthy, too, as SAP is now without question the most developer friendly enterprise technology company in the market. IBM nor Oracle nor HP can match right now the level of commitment that SAP is making to developers.

Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. The signup page includes detailed instructions for the setup.

SAP is making three different sizes available for developers. As noted on the SAP community network site, you can use the AWS pricing calculator, which is pre-configured for 4 hours of daily usage on the smallest available size.

More information:

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In the same vein:

Bernhard Schulzki from EMC and Satinder Sethi from Cisco Talk HANA at SAPphire 2012

Kit Dotson — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:52:06 +0000

Bernhard Schulzki, Vice President of EMC Solutions Group, and Satinder Sethi, VP of Service Access & Virtualization Technology at Cisco, spoke with Dave Vellante at SAPphire 2012 about the cloud and HANA infrastructure. (See the video at the end of the article for the full interview.)

Schulzki says that the specific emphasis on solutions with SAP in partnership with Cisco involves HANA and the journey into the cloud. Especially because Cisco is one of the leading providers helping to deliver people into the cloud via broader networking and datacenters.

He also spoke about how EMC intends to use Cisco led certification for HANA in order to move forward with development. “We’re responding to customer needs,” Schulzki said. “Everybody loves HANA,” and this appears to be the direction that the customers want to move in and therefore that’s where EMC and Cisco choose to attend.

Sethi said that Cisco sees a huge need in the market for a differentiated computing architecture and that this will lead modern day infrastructure.

“It doesn’t really matter what application I’m running or what point in time,” Sethi said speaking about abstraction and architecture under the tutelage of Cisco and their technology. “Look at some of the capabilities that HANA is trying to drive such as faster response time, information available instantly…agile infrastructure that can be scaled out, repurpose at any given point of time, and being able to deliver the performance that customers are looking for.”

Dave expanded that SAP becomes part of the mission critical horizontal app infrastructures, enabling the capability of running any app at any time they want and providing the agility to shift between different applications when they need it. With the advent of cloud-technology, applications are no longer tied directly to hardware, but are abstracted across clouds being upheld by a lot of networking infrastructure coupled with storage.

Schulzki went on to speak about how EMC Solutions has brought resilience to HANA architectures through an SAP context by providing fully automated storage tiering and being able to integrate with legacy systems or migrate from older systems. He expects that working with SAP’s infrastructure agnostic systems will help with virtualization and abstraction and as a result may simplify the toolset needed to make datacenters run.

“SAP has a roadmap that we want to attach to,” he said speaking about the cloud-to-cloud, “…and it’s good stuff coming out.”

In-memory computing is a very big deal in this industry because often software decisions are made based on the hardware available at the time. Hardware is a long-term decision that needs to be maintained and upgrade for future projects and an early decision can cripple future agility and growth—however, with SAP HANA solutions and layers of abstraction the hardware underneath doesn’t matter as much to the software on top, thus enabling customers to look to companies like EMC and Cisco to resolve their on-the-ground problems and use the abstraction software layer to provide them agility.

As a result, such products will be very fruitful for companies like Cisco and EMC as they allow them to collaborate with customers to give them the best possible infrastructure without locking them into something that may restrict their ability to remain customers in the future.

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In the same vein:

EMC and VCE’s Take on HANA at SAPphire 2012

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:20:01 +0000

Henrik Wagner, the head of SAP relations at EMC, shared some of his perspective on business software, and value, together with VCE’s D.J. Long during an interview with Dave Vellante on the Cube (see full video below).

Speaking at SAP SAPphire 2012, Wagner started by noting how he considers this particular conference as a unique opportunity to talk bottom line with customers, from the financial perspective rather than the technical aspect that is the prime focus of many other tech gatherings.

Long in turn got right to the point, making an observation about the ‘resistance’ to virtualization some traditional SAP clients demonstrate. He went on about how the advantages of Vblock often go unrecognized, at least initially, and Wagner continued this line of thought.

The EMC exec pointed at the areas that CIOs are looking at from the get-go – risk reduction, better SLAs and enhanced end user experience. EMC is addressing these bulletins as a part of its collaboration with SAP, and VCE apparently has been rounding out its own portfolio as well.

Responding to a question raised by Vellante, Long listed data protection and recovery as one very definitive area that his company’s offering addresses. It’s a part of the value proposition behind using running SAP apps on Vblock, he said, also stressing that the 45 days it takes to deploy the solution put VCE in a rather competitive position compared to other vendors.

Another topic that Vellante looked into is the potential flip side of VCE – the cost of the integration, and that customers may be worrying of consequent vendor lock-in. Long took up this question as well, saying that his company is more than compensating for the price tag with higher return on investment delivered within a relatively short timeframe.

From here the conversation branched off to several other areas, including HANA and some of the other trends joint SAP customers are starting to get involved with. For the whole story, check out the interview below.

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In the same vein:

Qualtrics Grows their Numbers by Analyzing the Numbers

Josette Rigsby — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:50:36 +0000

Qualtrics, which offers online data collection and analysis software and services, has announced it is receiving an impressive $70 million in funding from top venture capital firms Accel Partners and Sequoia. Although the company has existed since 1997 and has been profitable since 2002, this is the first round of venture capital Qualtrics has ever received. The massive investment is also the largest that Accel and Sequoia has ever made together.

Qualtrics Growing Their Numbers by Analyzing the Numbers

Qualtrics has capitalized on the growing importance of data to run businesses. The platform, which begins at $2,500 per month, has over 4,000 customers across 75 countries, including hundreds of universities and half of the Fortune 100. According to Qualtrics, they have experienced triple-digit growth since 2008 – not bad for a company hardly anyone that’s not using has heard of it. However, Qualtrics is not finished growing. The company will use the cash infusion to more aggressively expand its business and increase its staff from 200 to 450.

Qualtrics has recently added two new products to its portfolio. The first product, Qualtrics 360, allows organizations to do employee evaluations. The second product, Site Intercept, extends the core platform with the ability to target website customers based on their behavior and gathers feedback that can be used to improve customer retention or increase conversion rates. Qualtrics is not the first company that Accel and Sequoia have teamed to partner. The pair also funded AdMob, a mobile ad platform acquired in 2009 by Google and Nimbula, which provides infrastructure software that allows companies to build Amazon EC2 style clouds.

Big Data, Big Investments

It seems that companies offering big data related services are the thing attracting investor attention these days. Accel Partners has even established a $100 million fund to finance early stage big data companies. Birst, a company that began a cloud-based business intelligence platform, announced it had received $26 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures at the beginning of the month. Cloudera raised almost $40 million in November, MapR secured $25 million and 10Gen received $32 million. These companies are just a sample of the many big data related companies that are managing to acquire venture capital.

The big data market is still in a very embryonic state. There is an almost endless stream of vendors and products entering the market. Many of companies attracting million will not exist in a few years. However, data volumes are continuing to grow, and businesses are increasing realizing the potential of data to identify new market opportunities. This means there will be lots of demand and chances for new players experience success.

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In the same vein:

SAPphire Reveals SAP’s Continued Effort to Expand Reach Beyond ERP

Josette Rigsby — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:10:59 +0000

SAP’s Sapphire conference has kicked off in Orlando. The company, which has been experiencing some aging pains, is using the gathering as an opportunity to reposition the company as “a platform destination for partnering and collaborating,” according co-CEO Bill McDermott in his closing keynote at the end of day one. Although the keynote, which included three other executives, a speech, an interview and roundtable discussion, was entertaining, it might not be enough to propel growth. However, some of the new tools coming out of the software might.

Frictionless Enterprise Social

Let’s be honest, when someone says enterprise social, SAP is not the first company you think of. However, that could be changing. Sameer Patel, Global VP and General Manager, Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, explained that although it has been six years since enterprise 2.0 emerged, most companies are still struggling to with adoption. Companies like Jive, Telligent and Yammer have popular products, and SAP hasn’t been aggressive in positioning its StreamWork as a direct competitor in the space. SAP even uses Jive to power its public facing community website, but SAP has something that many other players in the enterprise social space do not – an enormous ecosystem of enterprise products.

SAP can (and has already started) to integrate its social offerings with its enterprise tools. Integrating with enterprise applications means the need for users to access two separate tools to engage in social collaboration would be eliminated. The integration could improve adoption and streamline business processes. SAP also introduced a new social collaboration tool in a first day keyonte, SuccessFactors Jam, one of the first outputs of SAP’s $3.4 billion dollar acquisition of SuccessFactors finalized in February. Jam was originally a focused on online training, but it seems that SAP will be positioning a general-purpose collaboration tool for cloud platforms. SAP may not lead the market for enterprise social now, but long term the company’s strategy to make enterprise social just another feature of enterprise applications could attract significant market support.

SAP Further Embraces the Cloud

In addition to its focus on social, SAP seems to finally be embracing the cloud. The company announced a new cloud strategy powered by its SuccessFactors acquisition. SAP is combining its ability to create large enterprise applications with the ready-to-use quality enabled by software-as-a-service. How committed is the company to its new strategy that has been dubbed People, Money, Customers and Suppliers? SAP has committed 5,000 resources to designing, building and delivering cloud solutons.

Embracing the cloud is a smart move, but it won’t be simple for SAP. The company will have to keep its existing, somewhat conservative customer base happy while simultaneously appealing to an entirely new target audience that expects simple, collaborative, cutting-edge applications. In addition, larger enterprises will want to operate in a hybrid environment and not completely replace existing enterprise software, unlike small and medium businesses (SMBs). SAP will need to support both use cases.

SAPs continued effort to expand its reach beyond enterprise resource planning software to social, cloud, mobile and data is the right thing to do. The market for cloud-based, on-demand software is growing five times faster than the demand for traditional on premises solutions according to IDC. Mobile device use is exploding in the enterprise. The potential for growth is promising, but SAP will have continued struggles with its goals. This is the third year the company has highlighted to topics at Sapphire. The previous instances didn’t result in explosive adoption. Perhaps the third time will be a charm.

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In the same vein:

Nvidia Prepares Graphics Card Lineup for the Cloud Gaming Era

Kit Dotson — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:31:02 +0000

The cloud has penetrated everything, even gaming, and Nvidia wants to craft the sails that will lead the gaming world into those cloudy waters with their upcoming Kepler-based graphics chips—these graphics cards will include features designed to enable cloud-gaming across the Internet and facilitate lower-lag with shinier graphics for the next generation of consoles.

Essentially, the way Nvidia and others see it: home consoles can only go so far in power and strength requirements for graphics and this means a cost-barrier to customers. So gaming-as-a-service breaks in by allowing data centers to house extremely powerful graphics cards on servers that run the games, render the graphics, and then stream them to the consoles. Lowering the power and cost needs at the client end and defraying costs for the enterprise.

Dean Takahashi from GamesBeat interviewed Nvidia senior vice president Dan Vivoli about Nvidia’s announcement of the Kepler-based cloud-gaming chipsets and how they might impact the industry as a whole,

But with improved multitasking on Nvidia’s Kepler-based graphics chips, each data center server can handle multiple users at a lower cost. That makes cloud gaming more economical, Vivoli said.

The Kepler-based chips have also been designed to reduce the latency, or time it takes for an interaction between computers, for cloud gaming. That means that there won’t be a perceptible delay in playing cloud games.

Nvidia is partnering with Gaikai, which has 24 data centers in the U.S., to help reduce network latency. Nvidia is building a grid-based computing platform, dubbed Nvidia GeForce Grid, for Kepler-based machines to access. Together with cloud graphics software, the Nvidia GeForce Grid will be enable cloud-gaming companies to operate with lower operating costs, said Phil Eisler, general manager of cloud graphics at Nvidia.

Companies such as OnLive, Gaikai, and Otoy have been seeking solutions to enable gaming services across the cloud for some time now and Nvidia has even sought a partnerships with them. Southern California-based Gaikai, Inc. was in the news last year for their endeavor to provide cloud-streaming and cloud-delivery assets to MMO games such as Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. We’ve also seen OnLive pushing into mobile with support for Xperia PLAY and appear on Internet-enabled TVs through being preloaded onto Google TV.

“The beauty of this approach is that GPUs will continue to improve all of the time,” Vivoli told GamesBeat. “Your hardware stays the same, but the data center hardware can be upgraded to handle better games.”

By using a datacenter packed with the Nvidia Kepler-based graphics cards, each of these different cloud-gaming outfits would be able to render the games in their servers and then pipe them to devices that would traditionally not be able to play triple-A titles such as Crysis 3—a set of devices that include thin-client consoles, Internet-enabled TVs, low-end PCs, and mobile devices.

With the production of this type of equipment we will probably seen the next generation of consoles have two modes: one that uses the internal graphics to allow the play of games the traditional way (possibly the primary selling point) and the second will be much like Xbox LIVE and other Intenet-enabled services that also allow for cloud-based gaming via OnLive, Gaikai and others using gaming-as-a-service datacenters.

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In the same vein:

Mr. October Reggie Jackson #44 on Leadership and SAP

John Casaretto — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:14:52 +0000

Always ready to cover any and all technology related topics the Cube had a visit from the one and only Mr. October, Reggie Jackson at the SAPphire 2012 conference (see full interview below). A Hall of Fame MVP Yankees and A’s legend, Jackson is also an accomplished business man and he shared his experiences with the SAP organization and how he is sharing his knowledge with the people that make the company tick. Donning a Callaway/SAP golf cap, Reggie retraces how he came to be associated with SAP.

Several months ago, Reggie was invited by Callaway Golf Company, a global sporting goods publicly-traded company that is a significant customer of SAP. With some fifteen to twenty thousand worldwide clients in attendance, he began to learn the customer and company success stories around SAP. After a brief meeting with CEO Bill McDermott, a relationship developed where it was found that Reggie was a good fit to represent the company.

Reggie on Teams, Leadership, People and SAP

Reggie shared some of the SAP vision and the push to be successful. The winning formula is of course the team principle- something Jackson knows much about. During his career as a professional baseball player with the Yankee’s and the A’s, as Reggie puts it, the blend of culture of winning, team principles, and pride of brand are critical. On to SAP – and in finding out what it represented to different people a number of definitions came his way – “Software and Programs”, “Somebody Always Pays”, and “Solutions Applications and Programs”. All of those variably good or bad, he has found the meaning “Software and People” to be the best most important one.

Expanding on Software and People, Reggie shares that the people make the company work. Leadership, players and talent are special pieces that have to be in place. It is people that execute the plan or the best of business plans go nowhere.

Furrier brought up the topic of transitioning from his baseball career to Jackson’s business career. In speaking to that transition, Jackson states that the key is to add your personal value, humble yourself, finding your fit and be grateful in trying to penetrate the environment -especially when there is already a successful history in place.

On the role of data, data analysis and its relationship to sports, a topic raised by Dave Vellante, Jackson responds with some insight. While data and the information that can be gained from these are very important, Jackson feels that without people to implement decisions that are made, it just doesn’t won’t work. People have to have the right character, leadership, management and an understanding of their role in the big picture.

A little more about Reggie

On to some more fun stuff, Reggie talked about his decision to play baseball despite the opportunity to play football. Providing for family was a chief concern to him because of family financial situations and the ready opportunity to play from college immediately. This was not an option at the time for football, though he alluded to a contract matter during which he thought about crossing over sports. He obviously made up his mind to stay with baseball and is happy with that decision.

Crazy Twitter question about the hip move

Furrier pulled out a question from Twitter for Reggie on whether the infamous “Hip Move” during the 1978 World Series game 4 versus the Dodgers was intentional, the sentiment being he could “be honest about it now”. The controversial play involved Jackson in a base play situation where it is alleged Jackson intentionally jutted out his hip to get hit by the ball, rendering him safe and allowing the tide of the game and series to be turned on that moment in time. Legendary manager Tommy LaSorda of the Los Angeles Dodgers famously exploded during the incident. I’ll leave it up to the viewer to see Reggie’s response to the question, surmise it to say that Reggie’s position is unchanged.

Reggie on Twitter

To find out more about Reggie and what he’s up to go to www.reggiejackson.com – also Reggie Jackson is coming to Twitter. This is something new for Reggie and despite some nervousness about it, he is getting help from Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. @octoberreggie. Growing up in the 70’s in Queens, Reggie Jackson #44 was an idol for me and the king of NYC. It was an honor to cover his story and his time on the Cube.

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In the same vein:

Microsoft a DevOps Player?

John Casaretto — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:00:01 +0000

DevOps on Microsoft – Seems kind of at odds doesn’t it? DevOps as a movement has been very close to open source roots, allowing developers to really drive the course over operations and infrastructure. Microsoft is moving towards DevOps integration by integrating new features in the forthcoming release of Visual Studio 11. The product remains in beta – and a release date has not been announced. Microsoft has a release-filled schedule ahead for the rest of 2012, and it can be expected that the juggernaut will be a significant player in the movement.

At the core of Visual Studio 11 is an updated Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). Within the IDE a number of new features achieve crossover into DevOps principle functionality. For example, back-end server applications and cloud applications can be built through the new features. There are newly integrated HTML5 functions which include drag-n-drop application building. This is also a feature for JavaScript. A newly implemented bridge to Microsoft’s System Center 2012 builds one piece of this integrated realm. System Center 2012 is a suite of data center tools and features a component that monitors the network for system state and other valuable information.

Application monitoring being one of the key concerns in production and development, tracking and analyzing issues in this construct can make a significant difference in DevOps as well as production. Specialized diagnostic information can now directly be integrated and get that information to developers for analysis. Visual Studio 2011 also feature Intellitrace functionality into programs that are built from the tool. Intellitrace allows trace logs to be generated during debugging and provides valuable, quick to acquire information to developers like never before.

The picture being drawn is that the combination of System Center 2012 and Visual Studio 11 have comprised a formidable platform for DevOps operations to take place. In addition, a number of other current and upcoming Microsoft products and features are starting to offer such integration touchpoints, such as Sharepoint, and SQL. It makes the combination of products a truly viable cloud and DevOps offering that can help organizations gravitate to better functionality altogether and do so with a familiar toolset and technology partner. With increased versatility and nimble operations, DevOps and the technology that drives it has created a need for products that can help deliver on the benefits. Microsoft’s growing offerings are primed to step in to satisfy this need across the enterprise.

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In the same vein:

SAP Saved the Best for Last – HANA SP4’s New Capabilities

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:35:24 +0000

It’s Day 3 of SAP SAPphire, and today the BI software maker finally released the most significant batch of HANA-related news scheduled from the event: HANA service pack 4.

The idea is that SAP customers can upgrade their deployment by purchasing service packs rather than new licenses, and this latest one packs more than enough marketability value. First and foremost, the in-memory analytics appliance now features deep integration with Hadoop.

Users can access data stored in Hive and Hadoop directly from HANA and the Sybase IQ database, a capability made more powerful thanks to the addition of text data processing. Being able to carry out ‘linguistic analysis,’ as the company calls it, is meant to improve the way clients are able to implement the enhanced version of HANA in their SAP environment.

“We are very excited to work with SAP to provide customers with real-time insights from their Hadoop environments using our complementary solutions,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and CEO, Cloudera. “The SAP real-time data platform, combined with the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution, will deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation ‘big data’ applications and analytics to the enterprise.”

On top of the Hadoop integration the platform also supports the R statistical language, and for the first time it has been opened up to developers via a partnership with Amazon. AWS now features a pre-configured HANA instance that essentially provides the foundation for a data-driven cloud app, as well as a considerably broadened outlook for the technology itself.

Finally, SAP announced eight new applications designed to supplement HANA and expand the core platform to more key areas in the enterprise. These solutions aim to make the appliance accessible to the less technical user base, such as the SAP Collections Insight tool that lets sales reps design visualized profiles of clients.

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