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 ...

When Alibaba Group Holding Ltd announced this month that it would commit $15 billion to increase its research and development initiatives between now and 2020, one of the sidebars to that news was the expansion of its presence in the U.S., specifically Silicon Valley. With data centers and small offices already established in the greater Bay Area, Alibaba ...

Much as a school views its educational mission from the perspective of shaping young minds, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. sees its role in the computing universe as that of building functioning, thinking machines. Alibaba Cloud has developed a set of machine learning-fueled platforms, such as ET City Brain and ET Industrial Brain, to solve many ...

Although Pentaho Corp. was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems Corp. in 2015 and is now part of the newly formed Hitachi Vantara-branded family of companies, it still plans to maintain a distinct identity in the business intelligence and analytics space. That point was driven home with last week’s announcement during PentahoWorld of Pentaho 8.0, a ...

Companies don’t generally like to admit mistakes or project failures, so it’s unusual when a firm the size of IBM Corp. confesses its shortcomings. Yet that’s exactly what a company with a current market capitalization of $143 billion is doing as it unveils its Cognitive Enterprise Blueprint. The goal is to provide customers with a ...

Impressive customer testimonials and a strategy for big data management at the edge of computing networks were a major part of the dialogue during the first day of PentahoWorld. But as executives from the newly created Hitachi Vantara business defined their vision of the computing future, there were still questions among analysts around how a ...

One of the more fascinating battles in technology today is playing out between Amazon and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Surging earnings have allowed Alibaba to grow nearer to Amazon.com Inc. in market capitalization over the past three months, and the Chinese e-commerce powerhouse briefly surpassed Amazon as the most valuable retailer in the online world. ...

IBM Corp.’s gathering of 150 chief data officers in Boston was a prime opportunity to have a frank discussion about the role and responsibility of a CDO in implementing the enterprise architecture blueprint. It’s an approach not without risk in today’s information technology community, since the CDO’s role has increasingly evolved into one where monetization ...

When Hitachi Data Systems Corp., or HDS, acquired data analytics firm Pentaho Corp. for a rumored $500 million two years ago, it marked yet another step in Hitachi’s business model transformation. What was once known as a company in the hardware, infrastructure and storage space was rapidly becoming a software and services vendor. And HDS was anticipating ...

A recent industry study showed that there will be 20 billion connected, data-generating “internet of things” devices in the market by 2020. Who is going to own all of that data? That’s the central question that is under much discussion in the information technology world these days as companies gaze warily at the internet of ...