News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an all-volunteer group of developers, stewards and incubators of technology. They bring us many of the technologies powering our enterprises and consumer solutions and are continuing to innovate in ways that are absolutely amazing and enjoyable to try to track. One of the greatest projects at the ASF is Hadoop, a capability that may turn out to be the greatest innovation of the century. I have been accused of … [Read more...]
On Monday, December 5, Bob Gourley went on the Enterprise CIO Forum to explain Big Data and why it matters. First, he defined Big Data simply as the data your organization cannot currently analyze. Though some technologists give more precise definitions, this sums up the challenge enterprises now face. If you can deal with all of your data now, you don't have a Big Data problem, but as soon as you have more data than you can effectively manage to finding … [Read more...]
Last week I was fortunate enough to sit down with Power Assure's CTO and co-founder, Clemens Pfeiffer. Power Assure provides data center data center infrastructure and energy management tools, but their expertise with data centers carries far beyond just power management. Clemens spoke to me about how Power Assure can help any data center identify weaknesses and move to an energy efficient modern data center. Power Assure can help CTOs identify a … [Read more...]
IBM's Watson, an artificial intelligence computer system which famously defeated two all-time Jeopardy! quiz show champions, may soon go from playing games to answering questions in the workplace and call centers as IBM looks to modify the technology for business. Watson was powered by distributed computing technologies such as Apache Hadoop, which was used for pre-processing, to answer the game's queries on diverse subjects from science to popular … [Read more...]
The celebration of IBM's 100th birthday this month has focused the spotlight squarely on Big Blue. In an industry where companies fail all the time, IBM's ability to stay relevant is impressive. So how does a company like IBM manage to stick around for so long? As the ERP market analyst at Software Advice, I typically write about trends related to manufacturing software. But IBM is such a fascinating company and so pervasive in enterprise technology … [Read more...]
Earlier, I wrote on the use of Hadoop in the exciting, evolving field of Bioinformatics. I have since had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Ron Taylor of Pacific Northwest National Library, the author of "An overview of the Hadoop/MapReduce/HBase framework and its current applications in bioinformatics", on what's changed in the half-year since its publication and what's to come. As Dr. Taylor expected, Hadoop and it's "ecosystem" including MapReduce … [Read more...]
The DoDIIS Conference Agenda is now up at the conference site, and it really looks to be a great one. The confernece will be great for technology leaders in government, technology providers from industry, and the mission-focused executive leadership who seeks to guide both. If you want to shape the future, come to the DoDIIS conference and see what secure enterprises with advanced analytical missions are up to. I've pasted the full agenda below, but … [Read more...]
Friends at FedScoop have a tremendous reputation for helping the community think through today's challenges. One way they are doing that is by bringing together government/industry/academia and citizens to dialog directly and then capturing the results in blogs and video. I expect that model will deliver a great day of cyber security discussion on Thursday 24 February 2011 when their Cybersecurity Summit is held in DC. For more information please … [Read more...]
Are you striving to know more about federal approaches to cyber security? In what looks to be one of the best conferences on this topic for 2011, the American Institute of Engineers (AIE) and the Technology Training Corporation (TTC) are presenting Cyber Security: Missions, Initiatives, Opportunities and Risks in Washington DC from 16-18 March 2011. The agenda indicates this will be a great session, with a slate of interesting speakers from … [Read more...]