Stacey Higginbotham penned a post at GigaOm entitled “Systems to handle big data might be this generation’s moon landing.”  Since it was posted on April 1, I asked myself if this was an April Fool’s Day joke as the comparison seemed a little farfetched; but then I realized the analogy was not about  the emotional significance of the first moon landing  but about the complexity of the problem Big Data is trying to solve. More...

Gartner recently released its webinar on the Top Security Trends and Takeaways for 2012, and here are a few highlights. Most interesting is the perception versus the reality, and some tips on making security relevant across the entire enterprise. More...

Think about this: The volume of data generated in 2009 alone was greater than in the preceding 5,000 years combined, says Gartner. Today, enterprises know there is opportunity in Big Data.  In fact, says Forrester, business intelligence is ranked as the number one technology to drive change in 2012, creating significant business value as data mining and reporting tools become more sophisticated and move into the cloud. Businesses expect to reap the benefits of mobile business intelligence (MBI) to expeditiously, and smartly, improve business processes, reduce inefficiencies, and discover new revenue opportunities. More...

One of the biggest trends on the minds of enterprise IT executives is “Big Data,” a term coined a couple of years ago by Gartner. One of the first things to come to mind when some hear that term is “Hadoop.” Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly apparent that many folks are still not up to speed on Hadoop. In a nutshell, Hadoop is a Linux technology that supports the trend toward virtualization, allowing data and applications to span multiple virtual servers.  More...

We talk about Big Data – the abundance of information that is being created, stored, mined, and accessed online. One of the biggest trends in 2012 is sentiment analysis – how enterprises can mine and make sense of online data to use to their competitive advantage. Through sentiment analysis, businesses can turn attitudes and emotions, expressed online through social media, into actionable results. More...

In focusing on the enterprise, it is becoming increasingly apparent that consumer technology drives the enterprise. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement was forced upon enterprises as a result of the popularity of the widely copied Apple iPhone. Now, I am spotting a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) movement, which is destined to have a similar impact. More...

In the cloud computing space, Salesforce.com is once again showing that it has vision about how the workplace of tomorrow will change. At the end of 2009, Salesforce.com acquired a company to bolster the site’s social capabilities. The social fabric now known as Salesforce Chatter was a result of that acquisition. Now, Salesforce.com has just purchased another company known as Rypple. As a result of this and similar moves by enterprise application providers, I suspect Fortune 500 executives will flock rapidly to a new buzzword: “gamification.” More...

Meet two of today’s innovators – not ordinary innovators, in fact some might even say geniuses. These two young men haven’t yet reached 19 years of age. What unites these innovators is that they are tackling one of today’s biggest Internet problems: helping people search and use relevant data. More...

Already 2012 technology predictions are being revealed. Gartner recently released its top 10 strategic technology trends for the coming year. Here’s a look. More...

Techspeak:  A language and set of vocabulary, including slang, specifically used to communicate within the technology industry (as defined by this blogger).  While techspeak has not yet made it into The Oxford English Dictionary, or Wikipedia, more than 400 new words did in 2011. We talk about the speed at which technology changes.  It makes sense that a new vocabulary of words and acronyms would flourish too. More...