James Kobielus
Latest from James Kobielus
ANALYSIS
At DataWorks 2018, Hortonworks accelerates its shift toward public cloud deployments
DataWorks Summit began as Hadoop Summit in 2008, when it was a developer event hosted by Yahoo Inc. The big-data market exploded as established data vendors and hot startups spawned a dynamo of innovation, and the core technology evolved and eventually gave way to a deeper open-source ecosystem. What has remained the same is data’s ...
COMMENTARY
Principles versus profit: AI and the fate of the planet
It seems as if everybody is starting to look at artificial intelligence as some sort of make-or-break technology for the human race. Where the fate of the planet is concerned, there is an increasing collision between the nationalistic view that AI’s overriding purpose is to help countries hold their own in geopolitical struggles and the ...
ANALYSIS
Stream computing transforms businesses into digital dynamos
Digital businesses succeed by achieving greater real-time intimacy with their customers across every touchpoint and channel. And nothing delivers that intimacy — plus speedier business insights and faster business results — quite like stream computing. In the 21st century, stream computing is becoming the foundation for transformation of all customer-facing and back-end business processes. Streaming is as ...
ANALYSIS
Apple seems to be losing its capacity to innovate
Apple Inc. has long been known as an innovator, but it seems to be losing its way. At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this past week in San Jose, California, Apple disappointed many industry observers who expected, or at least hoped, it would announce new hardware. Also, judging by the blizzard of innovations launched at ...
ANALYSIS
Databricks goes well beyond Spark into complex, multicloud AI pipelines
Apache Spark was the pinnacle of advanced analytics just a few years ago. As the primary developer of this technology, Databricks Inc. has played a key role both in its commercial adoption, in the evolution of the community’s underlying open-source codebase, and in pushing Spark-based machine learning and streaming into the mainstream of enterprise computing. However, ...
ANALYSIS
Microsoft’s GitHub takeover sends shockwaves through the open-source developer ecosystem
The open-source developer community now confronts an acquisition of seismic impact. Today, Microsoft Corp. announced an agreement to acquire San Francisco-based open-source development community GitHub Inc. for $7.5 billion. Just as Oracle Corp.’s 2009 acquisition of the Sun Microsystems Inc.-developed Java sent shockwaves through the web developer ecosystem, Microsoft’s pending GitHub takeover is causing waves of ...
ANALYSIS
Machine learning is becoming a strategic perimeter for GDPR compliance
Privacy advocates have placed an unfair stigma on machine learning. Despite what you may have heard through the mass media, ML is not some fiendish tool for invading people’s privacy. Regardless, now that European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has taken effect, there’s an even stronger scrutiny of ML applications in target marketing, customer engagement, experience optimization and ...
ANALYSIS
AI is becoming the nucleus of intelligent apps for robotic process automation
Robotic process automation, software that emulates how people carry out tasks in a process, is becoming one of the principal enterprise use cases for artificial intelligence. Established RPA solution providers are becoming prominent players in the cloud application development arena. Chief companies in this segment — which include Automation Anywhere Inc., BlackLine Inc., Blue Prism Group, Kofax ...
ANALYSIS
Securing the ‘internet of things’ from edge to edge
Securing everything everywhere is the ultimate pipe dream. Nevertheless, securing every “thing” is becoming a critical issue as we move into the era of the “Internet of things.” Security is critical to IoT’s adoption because we want to make sure we can “trust” the hardware, software, data and other connected elements we embed in our ...
DEEP DIVE
Now that GDPR’s regulatory hammer has officially come down, what’s your next step?
After many months of anticipation, preparation and sometimes panic, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into full effect today. GDPR is a legal framework for processing, movement and use of personal data in the EU, with allowances for data transfers outside the union. It is already having major impact on how global enterprises store, share and ...