Alex Williams
Latest from Alex Williams
A Space Tough to Manage? The Challenge Assistly Poses Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com announced its plans today to acquire Assistly, a startup that gives companies a way to instantly provide customer support by shadowing Facebook, Twitter and other data sources. The deal is reportedly valued at $50 million. Assistly represents a new breed of apps that bring social technologies to the deepest, darkest places of the enterprise. Assistly ...
No Hadoop – Oracle Announces Appliance for Small Business Market
No Hadoop news today from Oracle. Instead, Oracle announced a database appliance for the small and medium sized business market that integrates software, servers, storage and networking into one box. In a live Webast, President Mark Hurd said the hope is to make Oracle Database appliance say for small and mid-size companies to enjoy the benefits ...
A Take on Commerce 2.0
I decided to shoot a video, my commentary about what I learned yesterday at the IBM Global Summit. If it’s too much to bear, let me know. This is an experiment and any criticism, harsh or otherwise, is very welcome. It has been just a few months sine IBM announced its Smarter Commerce effort. IDC ...
An IBM Version of Cloud-Based E-Commerce
Simplifying the complex tangle of interconnected systems is a refrain we hear often when enterprise IT is the topic at vendor events such as this week’s IBM Smarter Commerce event. The issue is one about the new and the old. It’s about the old mainframes and the legacy infrastructure developed over a span of 20 ...
Smarter Commerce and the Internet of Things – A Complex Combo
The message here at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit is all about the customer. It is about connecting them, making them happy and all. But to make them happy requires a different approach than it did just a few years ago. It means connecting through social channels but also with appliances, smart phones, intelligent ...
Cloud Storage Costs 74% Less Than Running In-House
Cloud storage costs 74% less than running it in-house. That’s the conclusion of Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman who says that storing 100 terabytes of cloud storage costs $251,000 per year, compared to the $1 million price tag for internal storage. This is not to say that cloud storage is an ethereal utopia. There are latency issues. ...
From Cave Paintings to Microblogging – the Meandering Path of Communications Through the Ages [Infographic]
To commemorate its Confluence 4.0 release, Atlassian posted a fun infographic today that explores communication through the ages. I love the intro, explaining the difficulties of sending messages even with the aid of animals and “structured hand signals.” That’s a nice bow to the modern-day term: “structured content,” a facet of the updates Atlassian made to ...
The Difficulty in Adding Social Features to Already Established Applictations
Atlassian announced Confluence 4.0 today and with it officially recognized the “@” symbol for notifications in its collaborative service. That may not be the most significant new feature for the Atlassian product but it is noteworthy as an overall trend that is emerging in the enterprise and an example of the difficulties in adding social ...
How Scientists Share Ideas [Infographic]
Physicists are the social butterflies of the science world. What a concept, huh? And mathematicians are a bit less so. No big surprise there. I just ran across these findings in a post by Suzanne LaBarre of co.design in which she featured two fantastic data visualizations that shows the underlying connections between research institutions and ...
The China Cloud: A Discussion with Enomaly’s Reuven Cohen
Reuven Cohen is the founder of Enomaly, a cloud services provider. He is also one of the original CloudCamp founders. He travels more than most people I know. And a lot of that travel is to China and the Asia Pacific region. He is one of the first cloud people to start doing business in China ...