Sometimes, it’s necessary to build a new platform. But sometimes, app development is about the clever use of what you already have in front of you. And for the CIO  thinking how to integrate dozens of data silos, there are lots of lessons to be learned from smart enterprise services such as Salesforce.com and the ...

It’s almost funny. Virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, was supposed to be a panacea for what ails the modern IT department. Properly built, configured and deployed, VDI can boost agility, save energy, and enable a mobile workforce to do business with their existing devices. But that’s easier said than done, and many organizations find themselves ...

If IBM Watson proved anything, it’s that it’s not outside of the grasp of modern technology to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. That idea is core to Wikidata, a proposed addition to the Wikimedia project, as it seeks to collect hard-to-compute structured data – like a country’s population or an actor’s birthplace ...

Not to lead with the hyperbole, but it’s going to be hard to argue with the promise of big data analytics and the scalability of cloud when the combinations starts to solve one world problem after another. Okay, maybe that’s a ways off. But just yesterday, a pair of major cloud service providers made announcements ...

A new study, commissioned by Microsoft and researched by Edge Strategies, indicates that cloud usage is on the rise amongst SMBs, with paid service adoption set to double over the next five years. Apparently, there’s increasing belief in the notion that the cloud makes a company more competitive, adding features and functionality heretofore limited to the largest ...

“As we grow old, the beauty steals inward,” or so Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. I doubt he was talking about big data. But as it matures, can big data be used to provide the same insights inside the data center that it can provide for end customers, saving money and promoting sustainability? Energy management systems ...

eDiscovery is a disruptive technology: finding the relevant data for lawsuits or other legal actions used to take teams of lawyers weeks, months or years to do what an eDiscovery product can turn up in seconds, minutes or hours. The problem with eDiscovery, as we’ve pointed out in the past, is one of analytics: The ...

A new report from Synergy Research Group issued this week indicates that when it comes to computing systems, storage systems and networking infrastructure, HP and IBM are vying for leadership, with Cisco fast closing the gap. Synergy’s 4Q11 Cloud Equipment Market Share report says that in the fourth quarter of 2011, overall revenue in this field ...

Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has added former VMware cloud infrastructure czar Narayan Venkat to its executive team. Venkat is now VP of product management at the company which is moving to meet the needs of the expanding virtualization and big data analytics markets. Venkat is no stranger to the storage industry – he was business ...

The cloud can bring a lot of value to the enterprise that knows how to leverage it properly. But it comes with its own set of dangers, and in many ways, it’s still the wild frontier out there. Case in point: This week, Microsoft and HTC both announced the shutdown of cloud services, leaving dubious ...