Google Ventures has put $8.2 million into electronic signatures vendor DocuSign, bringing the reportedly unprofitable start-up’s juicy $47.5 million D round, announced last month, up to an even juicier $55.7 million and its total funding up over a handsome $112 million.
Google is reportedly supposed to help DocuSign lower the cost of customer acquisition and boost the quality of its sales leads by “making sure that organic search goes up and paid search goes down.”

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KDnuggets recently posted its annual poll on data mining software, and the R language retains its #1 ranking as the most commonly-used software for data mining: R is now used by 52.5% of poll respondents, compared with 45% last year. Donnie Berkholz provides an analysis of the year-on-year trends for Redmonk. He provides the chart below, and notes “the general trend of newer, open-source languages growing at varying speeds (Python followed by R and Hadoop-based options like Hive/Pig), while older languages including Java, SAS, and Matlab are bleeding users”. Meanwhile, the recently-released Rexer Analytics 2011 Data Miner Survey also ranks…

David Smith

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One thing in life, whether you are using a Garmin to go to a friend’s party or planning your career, you need to know where you’re going. Failure to have a destination in mind makes it very difficult to get directions. Even when you know where you’re going, you will have a terrible time getting there if your directions are bad. Take, for example, using a GPS to navigate between when they do major road construction and when you next update your GPS device’s maps. On a road by my house, I can actually drive down the road and be told that I’m on the highway 100 feet (30 meters) distant. Because I haven’t updated my device since they built this new road, it maps to the nearest one it can find going in the same direction. It is misinformed.

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A recent report from PwC estimates that between 15 and 30 percent of enterprise IT spending is of the roguish nature. That’s a pretty wide range, so we probably shouldn’t rely on the folks who put this survey together to land the next probe to Mars; need a bit more precision than that.

But, to give them a break, maybe we can assume this range means that some companies are at the lower end, others at the higher end. The survey covered companies in the US with revenues of more than $500 million. Its purpose ostensibly addresses rogue cloud-services buying (eg, AWS), but seems also to address the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) issue that’s emerged in an era of smartphones and tablet computers.

As we sit, the smartphone segment has several platforms, slightly reminiscent of the early PC days. This time, though, there are fewer platforms and much less chance that Microsoft will emerge as the monopolist. It’s also unlikely that Apple will do so, as the company stubbornly (and successfully) refuses to license its platform. Thus, the iPhone’s initial market share of 90 percent+ has settled into a market share in the 40s, with the diffused Android OS taking a similar chunk.

The dying RIM platform looks as if its best shot will be to be integrated into an enterprise solution from IBM. I’ve said before that Windows 8 phones will end up being important if major telcos embrace them. I’m having doubts, though, as I see chaos brewing at Microsoft with its unfocused OS story – by January, we could have one OS for phones, a different one for low-end Surface tablets, a slightly different one for high-end Surfaces, and another for laptops and desktops. Not a pretty picture.

The global legal battle between Apple and Samsung is the big story right now in the BYOD space. As a general rule, judges don’t like to make business law and they don’t like to resolve what they view as playground squabbles. Matters of intellectual property in the IT world are particularly difficult to adjudicate, as they represent the worst possible combination of Patent Office buffaloeing and legal casuistry. It’s hard to believe that in the end Samsung will be prevented from hawking its wares.

So we live in interesting times. Rogue cloud-services buying is one thing, but let’s think this through. It seems as if this buying is truly roguish, ie, not central to the mission. I doubt any serious enterprise app deployment will be done on a stealth basis that ignores the IT department entirely. I don’t doubt that people will continue to bring their own devices to work, or demand their own particular device, depending on how many chits they’ve built up with top management. It doesn’t matter if it’s 15 percent or 30 percent. In the end, IT departments will respond to C-suite directives.

The real issue is whether or not your top management is paying attention to what’s going on, and is flexible enough to bring whatever technology is best brought to bear for your company. If it is, these rogue issues will remain on the margins. If it’s not, then your company will die.

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GridGain will present at Twin Cities Java JUG about “Streaming MapReduce with GridGain and Scala”. As always, JUG is hosted by Intertech. Live coding, good introduction into in-memory computing and data processing and plenty of……

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Here is a summary of the Gartner Hype Cycle for “Emerging Technologies” for 2012 – what is stated explicitly, what can be inferred. This Hype Cycle is suppose provide insight into emerging technologies that have broad, cross-industry relevance, and are transformational and high impact in potential. Most crowded hype cycle on emerging technologies in last … Read more

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The data center (as we knew it) is never going to be the same. Fluid changes are already in motion, brought about largely as a result of ‘paradigm’ shifts in computing.
empowerment for those that can bring meaningful analytics to bear upon the new data stack and, conversely, security concerns for those who fail to grasp the new triffid-sized nettle that has the growth potential to run rampant.
Colorful analogies aside… what are we talking about here in real terms? Enterprises today are increasingly forced to deal with massive amounts of so-called Big Data as they have to contend with the risk of employees connecting to the network with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) tablets, smartphones and more.

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“We started in the high-performance computing area and have been focusing on Big Data for a while,” stated Michael King, Director of Cloud Content & Media at DataDirect Networks, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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