IBM Q2 Earnings Up, Mainframe Sales Flat
IBM announced second-quarter 2014 net income of $4.1 billion, compared with $3.2 billion in the second quarter of 2013, an increase of 28%. Total revenues for the second quarter of 2014 of $24.4 billion were down 2% from the second quarter 2013.
MIT Announces New System Capable of Reducing Data-Transmission Delays by Half
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new network-management system that, in experiments, reduced the average queue length of routers in a Facebook data center by 99.6% — virtually doing away with queues. The MIT system, dubbed Fastpass, relies on a central server called an "arbiter" to decide which nodes in the network may send data to which others during which periods of time. "It's not obvious that this is a good idea," says Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and one of the paper's co-authors.
MicroStrategy Consolidates Its Product Packaging
To make it easier for organizations to select MicroStrategy for all their business analytics and mobile application needs, MicroStrategy, a provider of enterprise software platforms, has introduced a new packaging structure that reduces its 21 discreet offerings into four simple packages.
ManageEngine Releases API for Security Log Information
A new API from ManageEngine enables third-party tools to access log data generated by EventLog Analyzer, the company's security information and event management solution. The EventLog Analyzer API enables security administrators to feed normalized log data into any third-party application.
ServiceNow Acquires Neebula Systems for $100 Million
ServiceNow, the enterprise IT cloud company, has signed an agreement to acquire Neebula Systems for approximately $100 million. The addition of ServiceWatch will augment the capabilities of other ServiceNow IT Operations Management products such as Event Management, Orchestration and Discovery. The all-cash transaction is expected to close this month.
Advanced and BOS Software Team Up to Support Mainframe Data Replication
Through a strategic partnership with BOS, Advanced will be providing its customers with tcVISION and tcACCESS from BOS, both of which are used by organizations to leverage the value of mainframe platforms and data. tcVISION is a mainframe data replication and synchronization system and tcACCESS enables the real-time bi-directional exchange of information between IBM mainframes and Linux, Microsoft Windows and UNIX based systems.
Apple and IBM Collaborate to Put IBM Apps in the Hands of iPad and iPhone Users
Considered a landmark partnership by industry observers, the new joint effort by IBM and Apple, to bring IBM MobileFirst for iOS Solutions to market is actually just one more step in a long line of innovative and sometimes surprising initiatives from IBM, the venerable IT powerhouse. Big Blue's extensive line of businesses range from mainframes to cloud software to ground-breaking partnerships in the open source space, including its commitment to Linux and the opening of the technology surrounding its Power Architecture offerings
InfiniDB Launches Version 4.6 with 60-Day Enterprise Trial Offer
InfiniDB has released version 4.6 of its fourth generation columnar data platform, which includes enhanced support for large-scale join operations and support for additional data load commands to speed the extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) process. The company also introduced a new 60-day enterprise trial that includes InfiniDB Enterprise Manager, a management console to simplify the administration of InfiniDB, and provide real-time visibility into the performance and availability of users' InfiniDB servers.
New Oracle Big Data SQL Helps Customers Securely Integrate Data Across Hadoop, NoSQL, and Oracle Database
Oracle today introduced Oracle Big Data SQL, which allows customers to run one SQL query across Hadoop, NoSQL, and Oracle Database, minimizing data movement while overcoming data silos. According to Oracle the new solution helps customers gain a competitive advantage by making it easier to uncover insights faster, and allows them to leverage existing SQL skills while protecting data security and enforcing governance. Oracle Big Data SQL runs on Oracle Big Data Appliance and can work in conjunction with Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
Databricks and SAP Partner on Spark Distribution Integrated with HANA
Databricks and SAP have collaborated on a Databricks-certified Apache Spark distribution offering for the SAP HANA platform. This production-ready distribution offering is the first result of a new partnership between Databricks and SAP.
IBM Ships Bluemix, Builds DevOps in the Cloud
Bluemix, IBM's open cloud development platform, is now generally available on the IBM Cloud Marketplace, and includes more than 50 services for building cloud-based business applications.
Zumasys Expands its MultiValue Solution Set with AccuTerm Software Acquisition
Zumasys, a provider of cloud computing and infrastructure solutions, has acquired California-based AccuSoft Enterprises, developer of AccuTerm software for remote access to MultiValue (Pick) database systems, GUI modernization capabilities, and secure access to applications running on the Zumasys cloud platform.
Oracle VM 3.3 Offers Unified Application Management Across x86 and SPARC Environments
Providing customers and partners with additional choices and interoperability, the latest release of Oracle's server virtualization product, Oracle VM 3.3, improves ease of use for x86 and SPARC architectures, offers better management features, and expanded support for both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, including support for OpenStack.
Mobile Application Development Picks Up Speed with New Oracle Mobile Application Framework
To support application developers who need to keep up with demand across multiple mobile platforms, Oracle has released new innovations within Oracle Mobile Suite. Oracle Mobile Suite includes the new Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) with an updated version of Oracle Service Bus optimized for mobile integration including native support for REST/JSON APIs.
Oracle SOA Suite 12c Simplifies Integration for Cloud, Mobile and Internet of Things
To meet emerging challenges in the enterprise fueled by the expansion of cloud, mobile and IoT, Oracle has introduced SOA Suite 12c with simplified integration capabilities. "We are seeing a lot of demand for any-to-any integration," said Amit Zavery, group vice president, Fusion Middleware, Oracle. "We have more than 5,000 customers using SOA Suite today," he said, adding that this release moves the needle even further and allows Oracle to differentiate against the competition more starkly. "The cloud and mobile capabilities will be very useful for customers looking for one, out-of-the-box solution for any kind of integration."
Alteryx and Databricks Drive Adoption of Apache Spark for Scalable Hadoop Analytics
As part of a collaboration to make Apache Hadoop and Spark accessible for everyday analysts, Alteryx and Databricks will become the primary committers to SparkR, a subset of the overall Apache Spark framework. In addition, Alteryx and Databricks are forming a technology and go-to-market partnership to accelerate the adoption of SparkR and SparkSQL, in order to help analysts get greater value from Spark as the leading open source in-memory engine.
Compuverde is Awarded Three U.S. Patents in Software-Defined Storage
Compuverde, a provider of a hyperconverged storage solution for service providers, telecommunications companies and enterprises, has been issued three U.S. patents - which cover innovations in data migration, self-healing and horizontal scaling of storage nodes. According to the company, the patents are part of Compuverde's global strategy of intellectual property protection in every major market worldwide.
Pivotal and EMC Offer Turnkey Hadoop Solution with Data Lake Hadoop
Data Lake Hadoop, a new bundle from Pivotal and EMC, combines scale-out enterprise storage and big data and analytics to offer a production-grade HDFS solution. The bundle consists of pre-configured EMC Isilon X410 nodes, HAWQ subscriptions and Pivotal HD, Pivotal's enterprise version of Apache Hadoop.
Certification Testing for Revolution R Enterprise Available
Revolution Analytics is providing certification testing for its flagship product, Revolution R Enterprise, with independent proctoring by Kryterion. Citing an anticipated shortage of individuals with advanced analytics expertise, Revolution Analytics says the certification is designed to demonstrate a person's proficiency in managing, mining and analyzing big data sets within the Revolution R Enterprise environment.
MicroStrategy Overhauls Product Packaging
MicroStrategy's full feature set, previously split into 21 discrete offerings, has been reduced to four packages that the company says will allow developers, analysts, power users. MicroStrategy also announced that it is extending free upgrades for existing clients to the premium capabilities included in the new product packaging, offering greater value to clients and new users to take advantage of the comprehensive MicroStrategy platform with simplified value-based pricing.
CA Technologies Selling Data Protection Business
To place greater focus on its core capabilities, CA Technologies has agreed to divest its arcserve business. Arcserve is a backup and recovery software solution, helps companies ensure the availability of mission-critical systems, applications and data. Once the transaction has been completed, arcserve will become an independent company.
Splunk and Syncsort Team Up to Open Mainframe Metrics
Splunk and Syncsort have formed a technical alliance to enable organizations to search, analyze and visualize massive streams of mainframe data. Joint customers include top Fortune 500 telcos, retailers, insurance, healthcare and financial organizations, which rely heavily on mainframes for critical business operations and want to leverage mainframe data for valuable business insights.
Google and Microsoft Join Forces to Promote Faster Ethernet Speeds
A consortium of cloud network vendors is working on a specification optimized to enable data center networks to run over a 25 or 50 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet link protocol. Member companies include Arista Networks, Broadcom Corporation, Google Inc., Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., and Microsoft Corp.
BMC Says It Can Automatically Cap Mainframe Spending
A new product from BMC, the BMC Intelligent Capping product is designed to help companies reduce their IBM mainframe software costs by optimizing capacity utilization across all logical partitions (LPARs), avoiding added-capacity purchases.
GT Software Enables Data Gathering Within or Outside Mainframes
GT Software has introduced a software platform and supporting services, that allows users to deploy, merge and better access data, within or outside the mainframe, across disparate platforms, programming languages or formats.
MongoDB CEO Max Schireson on the Challenges of Managing Data
The big challenge of managing data today is not simply the high volume or the fact that much of it is unstructured. It is the variety of data and the need to integrate it all in order to leverage its value, said MongoDB CEO Max Schireson during a keynote at the NoSQL database vendor's NYC conference, MongoDB World. "It is no longer good enough to just look at your data in silos," said Schireson.
New Plug-In Enables Real-Time Address Verification for Online Merchants
Melissa Data, a provider of contact data quality and integration solutions, has introduced a new data quality plug-in for Shopware e-commerce software that enables online merchants to validate and cleanse international addresses, correcting and standardizing them into the official postal format of each geographic locale, and adding missing components such as postal codes or region.
DataStax Enterprise 4.5 Integrates Spark for Real-Time Analytics
Following a recently announced a partnership with Databricks, DataStax has integrated Spark for real-­time analytics into DataStax Enterprise. In addition, the 4.5 release adds the ability to merge Cassandra data with Hadoop for integration of operational and historical data. The new release has been certified with Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks and DSE has been certified for their platforms.
Pythian Broadens Data Management Services with Blackbird.io Acquisition
Pythian, a provider of data management consulting and services, has acquired Blackbird.io, which has expertise in expertise in cloud, infrastructure as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), big data, MySQL, NoSQL, and enterprise infrastructure ecosystems, as well as a focus on operational essentials, including orchestration, configuration management, operational visibility, continuous delivery, and 24/7 operations management.
RainStor 6 Adds Archive Application for Hadoop 2.0
RainStor has added an archive application for Hadoop 2.0 with its latest release, RainStor 6. Building on RainStor's existing interactive SQL-on-Hadoop stack, the new archive application features XQuery for hierarchical data and documents, and extends analytics support to SQL 2003.
InfiniteGraph 3.3 Offers Functionality, Ease of Use, and Performance Enhancements
InfiniteGraph 3.3, the latest version of Objectivity's distributed enterprise graph database, offers improved functionality and ease of use along with additional performance improvements.
GT Software Rolls Out Next Gen Platform for Data Unification
GT Software has introduced a software platform and supporting services called the Data Unification Solution that allows users to deploy, merge and better access data, within or outside the mainframe, across disparate platforms, programming languages or formats.
Couchbase Adds $60 Million in New Funding to Support Expansion in NoSQL Market
NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has added on a $60 million series E-round of financing, led by two new investors, WestSummit and Accel Growth Fund. According to the company, the new investment is further evidence of the growth of the global big data market.
New Certification for Oracle Database In-Memory is Available for ISVs
With the introduction of Oracle Database In-Memory, Oracle PartnerNetwork's Oracle Database Ready certification now also includes Oracle Database In-Memory.
Oracle Announces Optimized x86 Servers for Oracle Database, Large-Memory Applications and Virtualization
Co-engineered with Oracle software, Oracle's new workload-specific servers, the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8, are the first to include elastic computing features, maximizing performance by adapting to different demands in real time. The Sun Server X4-4 is designed specifically for business intelligence and analytics and server consolidation, while the Sun Server X4-8 is designed for the Oracle Database In-Memory option and scale-up applications.
Sofbang Attains Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialization Status for WebLogic Server 12c
Sofbang, a solutions provider, and a Platinum level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) with expertise spanning key Oracle Fusion Middleware areas, has has achieved OPN Specialized status for Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.
SAP Expands PartnerEdge Program with More Big Data and Cloud Opportunities
SAP has made enhancements to the SAP PartnerEdge program for Application Development, its program enabling partners to build software applications on top of SAP platforms. "With these program enhancements, we support our ecosystem's move to the cloud powered by SAP HANA and increase our partners' choices to grow their business by innovating on top of our platform," said Bernd-Uwe Pagel, senior vice president, Platform Ecosystem & eChannels, SAP.
Delphix Teams with SAP to Virtualize SAP ASE Databases
Delphix's flagship product, the Delphix Agile Data Platform, has introduced database virtualization for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE). Currently in beta testing with SAP and Delphix customers, Delphix's new support of SAP ASE is scheduled to become generally available later this summer.
WFT Cloud Broadens Portfolio to Offer Virtualized Instances of SAP HANA
WFT Cloud, an enterprise-class cloud services provider, is extending its solution portfolio to offer customers virtualized instances of the SAP HANA platform for use in production landscapes. "WFT Cloud has virtualized multiple non-production landscapes running SAP HANA. We are now able to deliver value to customers by virtualizing SAP HANA in production landscapes," said Mahesh Reddy, CTO of Wharfedale Technologies.
Violin Memory 6200 All Flash Array is HANA-Certified
Violin Memory, Inc., a provider of all-flash storage arrays and appliances, has announced the availability of the Violin 6200 Series All Flash Array for the SAP HANA platform. Certification for the solution with SAP HANA was achieved by working in conjunction with the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, Calif. The new SAP-certified solution complements existing solutions from Violin for SAP IQ software and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE).
Dell Extends SAP Partnership with New Offerings
Dell has extended its longstanding collaboration with SAP. As part of the extended partnership, Dell is introducing new non-disruptive migration and modernization services for the SAP HANA platform and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), and has also worked with SAP to certify Dell PowerEdge R920 for running SAP HANA with with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in addition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
SAP Targets Cloud, Industry-Specific Solutions and Easy Customer Experience
SAP has launched Simple Finance, a new set of solutions powered by the HANA Enterprise Cloud. The company also announced that SAP Fiori, which provides an enhanced user experience, will now be included at no additional charge in all SAP software.
Fusion ION Accelerator Appliance Gets SAP-Certified to Run HANA
Fusion ION Accelerator version 2.3 is now certified by SAP as an enterprise storage solution for the SAP HANA platform. The new certification enables Fusion-io to participate in SAP's program for SAP HANA-tailored data center integration using its certified solution.
Revelation Software Gears Up for 2015 Conference and OpenInsight 10.0 Launch
Plans are underway for Revelation Software's 2015 conference which will showcase new features available in the next major release of its flagship product, OpenInsight 10.0.
Rocket Software Introduces Rocket CorVu NG 3.0 with U2 Native Query
Rocket Software has introduced Rocket CorVu NG 3.0, a BI and analytics solution for Rocket UniVerse and Rocket UniData. A highlight of the new release is the CorVu U2 Native Interface that allows the rapid assembly of queries through an intuitive U2-centric UI. The native access to U2 dictionary items enables developers to browse and select from existing field definitions, leverage existing processes and expressions defined in field definitions, and consume existing System Builder or Smart Queries inside CorVu.
DBTA 100 2014 - The Companies That Matter Most in Data
Data management challenges and opportunities have intensified over the past year. With organizations increasingly seeking to become data-driven entities—companies that actually use the data they are amassing for competitive advantage—DBTA set out to recognize innovative providers of hardware, software, and services. In this issue, Database Trends and Applications magazine introduces the second annual "DBTA 100" list of companies that matter most in data.
Informer Gets Top Rankings in TrustRadius
Entrinsik Informer, a web-based reporting business intelligence solution that integrates real-time data from multiple sources without requiring an ETL (Extract, Transfer, Load) process, has received top rankings on Trust Radius, according to the company.
Pentaho 5.1 Adds Features to Help Organizations Scale Big Data Operations
Pentaho has announced version 5.1 of its business analytics and data integration platform. The new release enables code-free analytics directly on the NoSQL database MongoDB, simplifies the data preparation process for data scientists, and offers full support for MapReduce 2.0 (YARN).