The consumerization of IT has been a hot topic for the past few years, as products like Jive SBS and IBM Lotus Connections bring social networking into the enterprise and Apple iPhones replace BlackBerries for legions of corporate workers. It has become something of a truism that innovation now starts in the consumer sectors and ...

This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects to which they contribute that are especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order. Puppet Labs is a startup founded by Luke Kanies, the creator of Puppet, an open source configuration automation tool. Puppet has become virtually synonymous with DevOps in ...

As Jeff Kelly pointed out there’s big money being invested in big data. And John Fritz has warned us that with big data comes big responsibility. But what’s driving this level of investment, and what’s putting so much power into the hands of data scientists, is big expectations. Big data applications are being used for ...

Identity management is going beyond managing passwords and resource permissions. It’s now also about productivity and mineable business data. And this expansion of scope could soon lead employers and employees into conflict. And that’s not to mention the number of companies that want to find ways to leverage this data for their own profit. The ...

Today social project management service Wrike announced a new Outlook plugin that integration project collaboration into Microsoft’s e-mail client. As part of the announcement, the company published the below infographic on the ongoing importance of e-mail in the social media era. The idea of unified communications has been around for a while – but what ...

Daily deal service LivingSocial just launched a new site called Hungry Academy to recruit developers. The twist: it’s recruiting people who aren’t developers yet. The new new recruits will be trained in Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails by Jumpstart Lab over five months in Washington, DC before having the opportunity to join the LivingSocial team. In many ...

Reuters is reporting that Amazon.com courted BlackBerry maker RIM for a possible acquisition, but the deal fell apart due to lack of interest on RIM’s part. And it’s not just Amazon.com that got the cold shoulder – apparently Microsoft and Nokia considered a joint take over as well. I’m not going to say that RIM ...

This week I talked to Jim Adamczyk and Tomas Nystrom of Accenture about how the company’s software-as-a-service and open source strategies. Adamczyk is CTO of Accenture Software and Nystrom is the Accenture global lead for open source. Together they explained the interwoven nature of these two technology trends and how Accenture is adapting. The key ...

Today Telligent announced that it will acquire fellow enterprise social networking company Leverage Software. Details of the deal were not disclosed. The companies seem like a good fit. It appears that rather than trying to make up for some missing element of its offering, Telligent is picking up Leverage to enhance its existing strengths. Like ...

Former HP Vertica VP of Communications, Media and Entertainment Derek Schoettle has joined Cloudant as CEO the company announced today. Schoettle is replacing co-founder and CEO Alan Hoffman, who will now be the company’s head of product. Cloudant was founded by three MIT physicists who worked together on the Large Hadron Collider – Adam Kocoloski, ...