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

CA buys Rally Software for DevOps and cloud-based agile development in $480m deal – Computing

Company says its customers need to develop software faster. Rally claims users in more than 135 countries and almost every industry. Its sales were $88 million in fiscal 2015, following a $70 million IPO in 2013. Computerworld says more than two-thirds of 560 companies surveyed by Forrester have implemented or plan to implement agile methodologies.

Workday stock plunges most since 2012 as Oracle competition grows – San Jose Mercury News

Company says growth this year will be about half of last year’s. Oracle competition cited as a factor. Workday was founded by the people who founded PeopleSoft, which Oracle bought in 2005 and then ripped to shreds. Looks like they’re in for more Ellison-branded punishment.

Gigaom resurrected: 6 media companies that came back from the dead – VentureBeat

It’s been acquired by a mysterious outfit called Knowingly, headed by Byron Reese, who was the former chief innovation officer for Demand Media, a publishing outfit that sought to eliminate the lines between writing and typing. Demand Media briefly flourished in the days when keyword-stuffing was sufficient to achieve good placement on Google, but changes to the Google algorithm have made that formula a lot tougher to monetize. Still, the company does a good job of making content go viral.

ClearDATA Raises $25 Million in Series C Financing to Fuel Growth – PRNewswire

Firm addresses fragmented and aging IT infrastructures with a single cloud platform for managing regulated health care data.

Product News

IBM steps up analytics rollouts for industries – ZDNet

It launches the first 20 of what it says will be more than 100 analytical apps it will release for vertical markets. The strategy is similar to the iOS apps IBM is building under its alliance with Apple. The U.S. launch of this strategy is set for 11 EDT today. Apparently, Australia got the news first.

Redmond whips sheet off first SQL Server 2016 public preview – The Register

Major improvements include the ability for SQL Server to process encrypted data without unencrypting it first, support for hybrid on-premise/cloud databases and in-memory OLTP for significantly better performance. InformationWeek has a few more details.

Trends & Analysis

IRS cut its cybersecurity staff by 11% over four years – Computerworld

But to be fare, it actually increased its security budget by nine percent this year. Computerworld says the disconnect could be because of a shift to outsourcing security services, which isn’t always a good idea, according to Alan Paller of SANS Institute. In any case, the data breach disclosed yesterday wasn’t a failure of IRS security but rather a consequence of identity theft.

Global Hadoop Market (Hardware, Software, Services) and Forecast 2014 – 2020 – MarketWatch

I noted this because of the headline, but the press release is almost illiterate, and the author is apparently unaware of how to use hypertext.

IBM Watson gets smart in the oil refinery business – PCWorld

Woodside Energy sets out to turn Watson into a refinery sage so that engineers can ask it questions about complex issues that now require human expertise to answer.

Meeker: the hottest enterprise startups – Business Insider

A list of 14 companies that the Kleiner Perkins analyst thinks will change the workplace. They include Stripe, Slack, Square, Domo and DocuSign, as well as a bunch I’ve never heard of.

Photo by Library of Congress via Flickr