By Krishna Ramaswamy, Ph.D

Big data is a big topic. It is one of the most popular buzzwords in the tech world today. From finance and banking, genomics and healthcare, to marketing and communications, nearly all industries want to utilise data to drive business decisions. Advances in communications, social networking, and information technology have fueled a tsunami of Big Data paving the way for development of interactive data visualisation tools.

Traditionally, data visualisation tools were static, non-interactive graphs and tables that were a staple in board rooms. They provided a visual representation of the data, but required more time to analyze and understand the data. Further, the traditional data visualisation tools could be error prone and often required in-depth knowledge of the application in use. The increased interest and advancements we are experiencing with interactive data visualization can be attributed to:

• Advances in computational power, data analysis and graphics …

IBM has announced a new big data service available on its app-store-esque IBM Cloud Marketplace from today, called IBM Navigator on Cloud.

The service, an IBM press release boasts, “is transforming how organisations engage with business content and make it more usable and interactive across the enterprise to deliver better results and improve decision making.” In plain English, this means employees can synchronise data and content across any browser, desktop and mobile device.

“IBM is fulfilling an unmet need in the marketplace by providing a new service that combines enterprise grade security, governance and integration with mobile and web apps that are easy to interact with and use,” said enterprise content management general manager Doug Hunt in a statement.

Navigator on Cloud is built on SoftLayer, and utilises enterprise content management (ECM), which theoretically gives employees that consumerisation-of-IT feel through file sharing without making any compromise on security. It’s …

As the cloud wars gain pace from the big vendors, customers are losing out due to overwhelming failure rates, according to new research from enterprise cloud infrastructure provider iland.

“Stories about successful cloud implementations are captivating, but the reality is that cloud is more complex than many news headlines make it out to be,” said EMA vice president Dennis Drogseth. “Companies must be self-aware.”

The research, of more than 400 professionals across three continents, found that respondents used on average three cloud vendors. Even though vendor lock-in is thankfully scarcer now than a few years ago, this lack of a pressing need for a single vendor indicates an ongoing effort to find the right cloud solution, according to iland.

Customers are suffering as a result of the cloud wars, the research asserts. The highest failure rates customers reported were by Rackspace (63%), followed by AWS (57%) and Microsoft Azure (44 …

Simon Taylor, Chairman and Co-founder, Next Generation Data

There isn’t much in the way of silver linings when clouds stop working, which they tend to do from time to time. While no doubt you will have put in place comprehensive service level agreements with your providers, these on their own cannot deliver maximum cloud cover.

In the end your cloud lives in a data centre or data centres which could be based anywhere – locally, on the other side of the country, in another country altogether. Unfortunately some of these aren’t always particularly secure or efficient and even the most diligent cloud provider cannot predict or prevent the consequences of data centre downtime caused by power outages, storm damage or security breaches.

Many cloud providers are also often reliant on third party data centres for hosting services being delivered to your business which can cause added complications. But in …

Clare McCarthy, Practice Leader, Telco IT

Nokia held its fifth analyst event in advance of the TM Forum’s Management World (TMF Live!) in Nice. After six years under the NSN banner, the company did not hesitate to return to a Nokia brand that fronts a networks business. The “new Nokia” comprises three business units:

• Nokia Networks includes all of its core and radio access network solutions, as well as its customer experience management (CEM) and OSS solutions and services – basically the whole of the former NSN business, which accounts for 90% of new Nokia’s business.
• The business unit Here accounts for Nokia’s mapping arms, including the Navtec acquisition, and accounts for around 7% of revenues.
• Technologies comprises all of Nokia’s patents, including some from its device heritage, and accounts for 3% of revenues.

Objectives for the “new Nokia”

Nokia’s services business, which is included in …

Software as a service (SaaS) adoption has more than quintupled since 2011 with the front office leading the way, research from North Bridge Venture Partners has shown.

The data, which polled 1358 respondents, found that SaaS was becoming increasingly important as a CIO priority, behind security software and business intelligence, hitting 74% adoption this year. IaaS and PaaS, in comparison, lag behind on 56% and 41% adoption respectively.

The report revealed fairly solid figures for cloud adoption and innovation. Nearly half (49%) of respondents claimed companies use cloud computing for revenue generation or product development activities, while a similar number (45%) want to or already run their company in the cloud.

The transition phase is also rapidly improving, according to the research. Aside from manufacturing, two thirds of respondents across all business apps will move some or most of their processing to the cloud in the next two years. This …

The scorched-earth legal and PR battle currently taking place between Netflix and Verizon makes for some entertaining headlines. But the outcome of this fight will have profound impacts for both end-users and IT professionals. 

One thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is the potential effect that this battle could potentially have over market freedom and competitively within the general SaaS and media space. But before we get into this discussion, let’s look at some of the key areas of conflict that have pushed the Net Neutrality debate to the point where it is today. (Not just for Netflix-Verizon, but for the general ISP industry as a whole).

Consumers and SaaS/Content Providers

The argument from the consumer and SaaS and content provider perspective is simple and easy enough to understand. Consumers are paying for a specific ISP service, and they would like to enjoy the full benefits of …

Gary Barnett, Enterprise Mobility and Productivity Software

At IBM Innovate 2014 in Orlando, Florida, IBM announced that its BlueMix PaaS offering will be made generally available at the end of June. BlueMix was first launched as a beta program in February this year at IBM’s Pulse conference, and the platform has seen a considerable amount of development in the four months since its first unveiling.

BlueMix is based on CloudFoundry, and runs on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure management platform. IBM has also integrated DevOps services (both from the open source world and from its Rational portfolio), along with a number of pre-built services from IBM and its partners presented via a highly polished user interface (the result of BlueMix being one of the first projects to benefit from IBM’s major Design initiative).

While IBM will be targeting enterprise developers with BlueMix, there is also a significant opportunity …

Chris Pennell, Lead Analyst, Public Sector

It is fair to say that the public sector’s view of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one of a platform supporting a set of tightly knitted solutions that tends to be customized to suit individual enterprise needs, in turn requiring a complex array of maintenance and licensing agreements. But the disruptive forces of cloud provide buyers with a chance to reconsider this preconception. Vendors must now puzzle over how buyers can carry on consuming best-of-breed services that allow for customization while satisfying their increasing demand for flexibility that cloud-based services purport to bring.

SAP provided more insight into how it would address this issue at its annual event, Sapphire Now. Though it reaffirmed that HANA would continue to be the core path for its customers’ migration to the cloud, it recognizes that it needs to make the journey simpler. SAP will need to …

Code Spaces, the web-based SVN and Git hosting provider, has ceased trading after revealing a devastating DDoS attack which wiped its cloudy data would cost too much to both resolve and keep the company going.

The unauthorised user gained access to the company’s EC2 control panel, created a series of backup logins and randomly deleted items to the extent where most of Code Spaces’ data had disappeared, with no backups in place. The attacker had also demanded a large sum of money to stop the DDoS, similar to Feedly’s attack earlier this month.

“Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point,” the company said in a statement. “The cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in a [sic] irreversible position both financially and in …