When Salesforce.com Inc. unveiled its new artificial intelligence platform in September of last year, the company chose a small, cartoonish figure with a bushy mustache and mop of unruly white hair to symbolize the most recent addition to its portfolio. At Dreamforce, the major annual conference held this week in San Francisco by the customer relationship ...

Recent reports indicate more than $90 billion will be spent on cybersecurity in 2017. In the aftermath of some of the largest data breaches in history, does anyone really believe it’s been money well spent? One top security company executive certainly doesn’t think so. “Organizations are spending 10 percent more on security, but the reality is that ...

When computers and nuclear equipment were attacked at a facility in Iran by the infamous Stuxnet worm in 2010, security researchers were amazed at the malware’s ability to bypass checks that required valid digital signatures. These software signatures are important because they are designed to block installation of malicious code. However, researchers divulged last week ...

Silicon Valley lore often focuses on the founders of major companies who later went on to become household names worldwide. Think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple Computer Inc., Larry Ellison at Oracle Corp., or Bill Hewlett and David Packard at Hewlett-Packard Co. But many of the technology industry’s untold stories involve the people ...

If the race for dominance in the cloud service provider market was a marathon road race, the current leaders of the running pack would be Amazon Web Services Inc. with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform striving to catch up. But industry observers believe the “race” as it stands today is only in the first ...

The vocabulary required to manage the flow of enterprise data is beginning to change again. It started with bytes and worked its way up the scale through kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. Then it progressed to terabytes and petabytes. Now, when top executives of data integration and analytics companies talk about scale, the conversation often turns ...

There may be nothing more terrifying in the enterprise computing world than being unable to look inside a system and see what’s happening. Blind faith is a bad idea and a sure ticket to disaster. In the serverless computing world, apps are hard to debug because they are constructed by deploying functions to cloud providers ...

When Sam Kroonenburg (pictured) and his brother were looking to build an online school that would teach cloud computing, there were platforms for hosting teaching content, but they took a hefty cut out of what could well be meager profits. So Kroonenburg cancelled a family vacation, locked himself in a relative’s home for four weeks, ...

In the 1980s, a popular TV personality named Warner Wolf made a national name for himself during nightly sportscasts by referencing the outcome of a game and then quickly declaring “let’s go to the videotape” to show the audience proof of what he had just described. Much as Wolf was a storyteller who used video ...

In the relatively short space of 18 years, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has grown from 18 people led by former English teacher Jack Ma to an ecommerce powerhouse with more than 50,000 employees and annual revenue of $23 billion. But it was no easy path, as Ma’s first two web-based businesses failed before he hit on the ...