Big data may have led to the creation of the position of “data scientist,” but not every question of analytics requires that specific kind of expertise. Or at least that’s what Rahul Deshmukh, Director of Web Intelligence for analytics platform developer Splunk, wrote in a blog entry this week. A data scientist, to use the ...

As I write this, I’m wrapping up my visit to ChefConf 2012, the inaugural user conference for the very popular Chef open source server configuration automation tool, where it was announced that over the last four years and 54 stable releases, more than 715 contributors have added their code to the pot. And with around ...

NASA is cutting its contributions to the OpenStack community due to the White House “cloud first,” policy. It seems ironic. OpenStack is all about the cloud. But NASA never intended to become  cloud platform and now that OpenStack is starting to see enterprise uptake, it’s time to back off, said Karen Petraska, service executive for computing services ...

SAP CIO Oliver Bussman stopped by The Cube (see full video below) at SAP SAPphire 2012 this week to talk about our own John Furrier and David Vellante about his life as a social media maven and how his internal IT staff becomes the taste-tester when it comes time for SAP to eat its own ...

Today, Google unveiled the Google Knowledge Graph, an enhancement to the search engine that gives it the brains to tell the differences and relationships between places, people and things – to use Google’s own example, the difference between Taj Mahal, the famous landmark, and Taj Mahal, the musician. As Google Senior VP of Engineering Amit Singhal ...

While theCube has been at SAP SAPphire 2012 this week, its competition at NetSuite used its own SuiteWorld event here in San Francisco to launch a new commerce-as-a-service (CaaS) product built on the brand new SuiteCommerce platform. NetSuite is traditionally known as an ERP company, but the hope is that connecting back-end data will set ...

The beta release of PostgreSQL 9.2, available to developers for testing as of yesterday, broadens its data type support to include the highly popular JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) open standard, according to a news item from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. It’s an especially well-timed announcement – as developers work to integrate legacy enterprise software with ...

Last week, IBM invited me down to the grand opening of the Silicon Valley IBM Innovation Center (IIC), a facility designed to educate Big Blue’s channel partners and help them integrate its product line into end-customer solutions. Every IIC has a specific area of focus designed to meet the needs of the local market its ...

A Microsoft-sponsored study released today indicates that despite the fact that security concerns remain a huge barrier to public cloud adoption, SMBs who made the transition actually saw their IT infrastructure get more secure, not less. To get a little more accurate, 35 percent of companies surveyed said that they actually saw notably higher levels ...

Last week William Alsup ruled that Google did in fact infringe on Oracle’s Java API copyrights. Google’s counterattack hinges on whether or not APIs themselves are copyrightable. While Oracle and Google’s respective legal teams argue the matter, the Free Software Foundation has stepped in with its own point of view: Oracle’s attempt to defend the ...