Loraine Lawson

I’m having a hard time believing some of the claims I see about data — particularly Big Data. And the sad thing is, I’m a huge proponent of its potential. Four Steps to a Big Data Strategy But it’s hard not to feel a bit cynical when you see stories like this, claiming Big Data […]

I don’t want to sound alarmist or anything – but if the economy fails, it’s because nobody really got a handle on that whole cloud/enterprise integration thing. Fourteen Technologies Needed to Implement a Fully Functional Private Cloud Or, at least, that’s what Natalie Kilner Hughes, founder and principal consultant at PBSI Enterprise Consultants, says in […]

Do you really need to be told the volume of data grew last year? Probably not, although the fact that it grew 56 percent is a nice data point. That’s what the Aberdeen Group found. What’s more interesting, according to David Linthicum, is that the Aberdeen Group report discovered business leaders want to access that […]

Once upon a time, there was a wizard named Robert McNamara who was better than any other wizard in the land at using data to find missing parts. This made him very popular with the military, which had so many things that it could not find them when it needed to fix its planes and […]

Once upon a time, there was a world war, and many planes were shot down. The King was very upset about this and asked his wizards, “How can we make sure our planes are safe, and do not get shot down?” The wizards decided to study all the planes that had been shot. They recorded […]

Once upon a time, in a land far away, wizards discovered a new magic called Big Data. Four Steps to a Big Data Strategy They were all excited about Big Data, because it would allow them to collect all kinds of information about the people in the land. Medical wizards thought they could use the […]

I hardly ever write about Microsoft and integration, but honestly, it’s not something that seems to be a strategic point of discussion for the business.  But this week at TechEd, Microsoft announced a public preview of its Windows Azure BizTalk Services for enterprise integration in the cloud and on-premise. Look at this NewsFactor article, and […]

A slew of announcements came out this week about integration, but it’s Informatica’s new offering, Vibe, that’s grabbing the tech headlines. Vibe is a virtual data machine engine. What is that? Well, Informatica is comparing it to Java Virtual Machine, which runs Java bytecode on just about anything. As far as I can tell, what […]

I read recently that cloud’s virtual environments (more precisely, its “dynamic resource assignment environment”) could create problems for integration. Basically, the problem is sort of like the shifting staircases at Hogwarts: Things keep moving around, which can make the integration difficult to maintain. The question that immediately popped into my mind is how integration-as-a-service providers […]

You’ve heard the adage that if you only have a hammer, everything is a nail? It seems some companies are falling prey to that level of logic when it comes to MDM. Five Ways to Know if Your Challenge Is Big Data or Lots of Data In a recent column, MDM expert Evan Levy shares […]

It’s a hard sell, getting CIOs and other IT leaders to think about integration as a discipline rather than a step in an application project. That’s why you can almost guarantee you’ll find waste there. John Schmidt is an expert at finding that waste. He now works for Informatica as vice president of Global Integration […]

While I focus on integration and data management issues, IT Business Edge’s Arthur Cole writes about infrastructure, including the actual databases. But sometimes, it’s not possible to separate the hardware from the data — especially when you start talking about Big Data. Eight Ways to Put Hadoop to Work in Any IT Department Two recent […]