Mike Vizard

The rise of ransomware coupled along with a variety of new compliance regulations is forcing IT organizations to rethink how they store and manage data. There’s clearly still a lot of interest in employing public cloud to store large amounts of data cost effectively. But many of the data protection and management tools that IT […]

Hitachi Vantara at a PentahoWorld 2017 conference today announced it will deliver an update to Pentaho data integration and analytics software through which users will be able to natively interact with Big Data applications based on the Apache Spark in-memory computing framework and the Apache Kafka messaging system for sharing streams of data. Pentaho was […]

Supply chains are fluid in that at any time, changes in availability of a key component can create a shortage that can have catastrophic effects on the business. The challenge organizations face today is that they are dependent on suppliers that in turn rely on other suppliers for key components. Keeping track of all those […]

Given the amount of malware that seems to be getting by cybersecurity defenses, there’s naturally a lot of frustration these days when it comes to IT security. In fact, some have even argued that trying to defend endpoints and network perimeters has become impossible. Symantec today moved to counter that argument via an update to […]

A fierce debate has raged for some time now over the future of the data warehouse. Proponents of various Big Data platforms have contended that data warehouses based on relational databases are effectively obsolete. And yet, regardless of the platform employed, SQL remains the dominant query language. Teradata this week moved to render this debate […]

There’s a massive amount of interest in machine learning algorithms and the frameworks that employ them to drive a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that every organization needs to develop its own algorithms and frameworks. The Apache Foundation today announced that Apache PredictionIO has now been named a […]

While reliance on PC-as-a-service (PCaaS) as a method for procuring PCs and other devices remains nascent, interest is definitely growing. As part of the shift to the cloud, many organizations now want to treat every aspect of IT as an operational expense, including all the hardware used to access cloud applications. With those issues in […]

RingCentral at a ConnectCentral 2017 conference today expanded its campaign to begin a central communications and collaboration hub in the cloud by adding integrations with Slack, Google Gmail and Amazon Alexa in addition to adding support for chatbots enabled by artificial intelligence technologies provided by Salesforce, Kore.ai and Gong.io within the core RingCentral Office service. […]

Cisco today moved to transform the collaboration application category by acquiring BroadSoft for $1.9 billion. Most of the collaboration software that BroadSoft provides is consumed by smaller enterprises accessing a set of services provided by third parties such as telecommunications carriers. Most of Cisco’s existing collaboration focus up until now has been on providing services […]

Oracle is betting that as organizations contemplate the enormity of what’s required to support and engage customers using modern technologies, a lot more of them are going to decide to rely on a cloud service for next-generation call center type applications. Brian Kracik, senior director of product marketing for enterprise communications and cloud services at […]

At this juncture, it’s not so much a question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will be applied, but rather when and how. In the case of SAP, the central AI focus will be on future releases of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Cockpit tool that organizations use to manage the company’s ERP applications running […]

AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco, unveiled a slew of offerings today that extend the reach and scope of the company’s monitoring capabilities delivered via the cloud. Those enhancements will be shown for the first time this week at an AppD event. An update to the company’s Business iQ service will add the ability to start […]