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

Biz Break: Salesforce wanted $70 billion from Microsoft, report says – San Jose Mercury News

Microsoft was willing to fork over fifty-five billion dollars for what would’ve been the largest merger in The computer industry’s history, said CNBC, but it wasn’t enough for Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff. See also Salesforce snubbed Microsoft’s $55bn biz gobble offer – report – The Register

EMC completes its hybrid cloud puzzle with Virtustream acquisition – SiliconANGLE

EMC said Virtustream, headquartered in Washington, D.C., will form EMC’s new managed cloud services business. EMC said It’s part of a strategy to help customers move all applications to the cloud “EMC will be uniquely positioned as a single source four our customers’ entire hybrid cloud infrastructure and services needs,” said Joe Tucci.

HP: you know we said we were done with cost cutting… – The Register

Coming on the heels of a weak earnings report, HP is set to cut another $2 billion in expenses and reduce headcount by 55,000 by the start of its next fiscal year in November.

Granify announces $7M round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures – VentureBeat

“The Canada-based platform analyzes customers’ activity to identify if they are potential buyers or if they are just window shopping. Then, Granify tries to persuade shoppers to buy the items by ‘providing contextual stimuli’ like reminders of ‘free, no-hassle returns.’”

BlackBerry axing staff worldwide in bid to make devices unit profitable – Computing

No specifics were released. However, Computing quotes City Index Group CIO Mike Lear as saying BlackBerry’s global market share had gone from 15 percent to about 0.8 per cent in two years.

Trends & Analysis

The Future Of Flash Is Massive Scale

“We are going from disks being the slowest things in the data center to flash being the fastest thing in the data center,” says Andy Warfield, co-founder and CTO of Coho Data. “The center of the data center is shifting from the CPU to the storage.”  This article goes into detail about how Coho Data is dealing with this problem through placement of SSDs and specialized network design.

IBM’s New Customer Service Software Can Feel Your Pain – Wall Street Journal

“The U.S. tech giant’s research lab in Haifa, Israel, is testing new software which it says can recognize the basic emotions of customers typing into a company’s automated online chat services or even tweeting with a company representative. The software is trained on texts from Twitter, chat formats and email, as people express themselves differently in those mediums. In the near future, there are plans to develop the software to include voice calls. It’s an attempt at improving customer support software so that big clients can cut costs on employing human staff.” The software goes in to test next month and IBM aims to add voice recognition in the near future.

8 Reasons IT Pros Hate The Cloud – InformationWeek

Consultant Andrew Froehlich postulates that most IT pros actually hate cloud computing and he’s put together a slideshow of the reasons why. It basically comes down to lack of control.

Death of a middleman: Cloud storage gateways – and their evolution – The Register

A Tata Communications survey last year found that within ten years enterprises will store 58 percent of their data in the cloud, compared with 28 percent today. But this present some problems because cloud storage is object-based, while on-premise SAN storage is block-based. Vendors are coming up with some creative ways to work around this incompatibility.

Product News

HP Debuts Affordable, Cloud-ready Thin Client with Broad Operating System Support – HP newsroom

With a choice of Linux, HP or Windows operating systems, A low-profile design and fan-less housing, the devices are designed for use in call centers and other noisy environments. List price is $239.

Microsoft implores enterprises to help it test optional Windows 7 updates – Computerworld

Enterprises typically ignore non-critical (i.e., not security-related) updates, but Microsoft is asking them to change that practice and start installing all updates the vendor provides. Microsoft says it’s in everyone’s best interest to have the same software on every machine, but it’s also testing the waters for the rollout of Windows 10, which will stream updates automatically.

Photo by osde8info