October 12, 2015

The merger of Dell and EMC stems from the rise of cloud computing

All of which helps to explain why Messrs Dell and Tucci are keen to merge their companies. Consolidation would give the merged firm more bargaining power, not least when dealing with big cloud providers themselves, and would also gel with another trend in the IT industry: converged infrastructure. Traditionally, servers, storage devices and networking equipment have been sold separately. Now they are being increasingly offered in integrated bundles by one vendor, sparing customers the tedious task of making them work together—a trend that has been pioneered by EMC in a joint venture with Cisco, a big maker of networking gear.


10 new words you need to know in Silicon Valley

A startup incubator provides management support and office space and other business resources for new companies trying to get off the ground. AngelPad is the biggest incubator in Silicon Valley. An accelerator has a tighter, shorter-term focus. The idea is to rapidly build a business in a few months, if not weeks, so that the company can succeed or crash quickly without too great of a loss. Accelerators offer mentorship for developing ideas and business plans, and provide an infusion of cash and employees, so that the company can function on its own quickly -- or fail fast.Y Combinator is the top accelerator in the valley.


5 ways the internet of things will change your everyday life

Coffee machines will chug into gear just in time to hand us a fresh cup as we walk out the door, as the lights, once more, operate throughout the day to make it seem like somebody is home. Smart doorbells – think Ring – will alert us when there is someone at the door, meaning we can accept deliveries even when abroad, or appear to be home even when in work. Pets won’t go unaffected, either, with a smart doggy door opening and closing as our pooch goes in and out of the back garden, while the humble smart watch connects to a home system so we can communicate with our lonely dogs, or a programmed laser toy can keep cats entertained.


Understanding basics of Recommendation Engines (with case study)

Ever wondered, “what algorithm google uses to maximize its target ads revenue?”. What about the e-commerce websites which advocates you through options such as ‘people who bought this also bought this’. Or “How does Facebook automatically suggest us to tag friends in pictures”? The answer is Recommendation Engines. With the growing amount of information on world wide web and with significant rise number of users, it becomes increasingly important for companies to search, map and provide them with the relevant chunk of information according to their preferences and tastes. Companies nowadays are building smart and intelligent recommendation engines by studying the past behavior of their users.


Microsoft Researchers Are Working on Multi-Person Virtual Reality

Microsoft is testing a commercial augmented reality product, called HoloLens. Lanier stresses that his work is separate from HoloLens and does not reflect how that product will develop. Still, multi-person mixed reality is a long-standing challenge for those interested in the technology. Beyond gaming, there is hope that virtual and augmented reality could prove useful for communications, collaboration, and for new ways of accessing and handling information. Lanier’s project is called Comradre (and pronounced “comradery”). A video produced by Lanier’s lab shows several projects developed by student interns in which more than one person interacts with the same virtual object or phenomena.


Big Data & Brews from Strata NY 2015: Tony Baer on Spark in the Hadoop Ecosystem

It’s really about a whole ecosystem. The fact is, is that it started getting into this contemplation of what is Hadoop? The fact is that what you’re really looking is a big data platform and ecosystem of technologies, and hopefully you’re working with technology providers that hopefully will simplify all this because the result is that you want to take advantage of innovations in scale-out clusters, commodity hardware, commodity software, so you can get results that are not commodity. ... The idea of simplifying Spark and making Spark accessible, so you can use it with tools, such as Datameer for instance. Their survey basically said that roughly about half, 49 percent I think was the exact, were using Spark basically stand alone


How to implement integrated management systems

When talking about an integrated management system (IMS), we mean systems where we deal with as many requirements as possible in the same way. E.g., if two systems have policy requirements (like management approval, revision, and communication), why don’t we deal with them the same way? Why don’t we control documents and records in the same form? When thinking about integrating management systems, there are many courses of action to be considered based on the organization’s context, the number of existing systems, and the systems’ maturity, for example. In terms of standards requirements, you can use PAS 99 as a guide (it can help you map and define one set of documentation, policies, procedures, and processes suitable for all of your management systems).


Kroger CIO: Four lessons for strategic IT

Kroger is a huge company, with almost $110 billion in revenue and 400,000 employees. Given his experience, Chris' perspective is highly valuable and can teach us a lot. As a brief summary, here are his four points on how a CIO can contribute strategically: Earn credibility as a reliable service provider; Learn the business profoundly well; Develop relationships with leaders across the company; and Rely on experts, both internal and external to the organization, to help you keep up with the latest technology. This simple advice presents a roadmap for CIO and IT relevance. However, executing the four-step program requires infrastructure, process, people, and technology. In other words, it's far easier said than done.


Future-proof your IT outsourcing contract: A CIO checklist

Getting each part of an IT outsourcing contract nailed down is labor-intensive. Pace Harmon, for example, "takes a shot" at writing the SLAs but at some point brings in the client's subject matter experts to go through the document line by line. "It's not easy, it's a grind," Sealock said. A word of caution: If the price per unit of work seems too good to be true, it probably is. Service providers eager to break into an industry are known to agree to a price point that is too low to meet the agreed-upon SLA. Once on the job and under pressure to improve margins, the service provider will start cutting corners. Another reason to get the alignment right on SOW, SLA and price?


Big Data Solutions with MS SQL ColumnStore Index

The primary purpose of the MS SQL CS Index was to enable the download of as much data as possible to memory and work with this memory when processing data, as opposed to reading it from the disc. Two advantages of this innovation were higher speed and lower HDD IOPS costs. But the product was not perfect. Even though the problem of read-only mode in the 2012 version was fixed with the 2014 clustered CS Index that lets you modify data in the table, it turned out with the clustered CS, it was impossible to have simple indices with calculable fields, foreign keys and triggers. When working with data, it is important to know which method of indexing is the most effective in which scenarios.



Quote for the day:

"Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.” -- Frederick Brooks Jr.

No comments:

Post a Comment