Mark Albertson
Latest from Mark Albertson
Despair, happiness and inflated expectations in the new world of ‘serverless’ computing
French fries didn’t originate in France, Bombay duck is a fish, and catgut actually comes from sheep. To the list of life’s misnomers can be added serverless computing, because it still requires hardware to run. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that serverless is becoming an increasingly popular option in the world of information technology, ...
Hot storage technology gets a cool down from Western Digital
When it comes to making major progress in technology innovation, one of the limiting factors has been heat. Rapid advances in the microprocessor industry have fueled remarkable growth, yet chip makers constantly grapple with the demands of energy released at ridiculous speeds in absurdly small spaces. The storage industry has wrestled with the heat dilemma ...
Fifty years old and still humming: Like the mainframe, Syncsort won’t quit
What are the oldest technology companies still operating today? Before Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle and Microsoft there was IBM, AT&T and Hewlett-Packard. General Electric goes all the way back to Thomas Edison in 1892. These are all household names to be sure, but there is one company on the “half a century and more” ...
Is content still king? NetApp’s head of strategy challenges conventional wisdom
The belief that “content is king” may have been codified into the collective consciousness in 1996 when none other than Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates wrote an essay by the same name. At the time, Gates believed that anything appearing on the internet would make a lot of money, but more than 20 years later, it’s ...
Big data stretch: Dell EMC goes elastic in new partnership
Late last month Dell EMC announced the Elastic Data Platform, designed to augment big data deployments with scalability and stronger controls around user access. The news was jointly released not just by Dell EMC, but through two of its key partners: BlueData Inc. and BlueTalon Inc. Such partner-driven solutions have become expected in enterprise computing — ...
InData predicts growing demand for computer vision in data science world
Data science has made rapid advances in automated understanding of spoken or written text. It’s now possible to take mountains of data from customer feedback, for example, and gain high-level insight into whether a business might soon experience a retention problem. But a new challenge will involve training computers to achieve the same level of ...
BMC Software takes a shift left to entice developers
In the technology world these days, when someone says that it’s time to shift left, they usually aren’t talking about lining up their friends for a selfie shot. Instead, shift left is an approach that places development tasks, such as monitoring, testing and automation, earlier in the digital workload lifecycle. With the recent introduction of ...
GlaxoSmithKline leverages AtScale to keep big data big
It’s like celebrating a birthday with a huge, nicely decorated cake, but the only view of it is one lonely slice. That’s the feeling that many companies have when trying to visualize and use large data sets in the enterprise. But one four-year-old startup is attracting customers by enabling big-picture views of big data without ...
IBM is so confident in PowerAI, it now comes with a guarantee
PowerAI, announced last year by IBM Corp., is geared for companies who might appreciate all that Watson (IBM’s cognitive computing and artificial intelligence supercomputer) has to offer. But they still desire a software toolkit that allows them to build an impressive deep learning framework. They don’t want to do all the work involved in assembling ...
IT complexity, lock-in create unease in the enterprise
When executives from the data management and storage company NetApp Inc. meet with customers, some common themes usually emerge. Companies are trying to modernize existing infrastructure, looking to build the next-generation data center, or they want to harness the power of the cloud. But behind these goals lies an undercurrent of unease, fueled by uncertainties ...









