Updated: 2012-02-08 22:51:11
A reporter interviewed me via IM about how CIOs should view SAS Institute and its products. Naturally, I have edited my comments (lightly) into a blog post. They turned out to be clustered into three groups, as follows: SAS faces a number of challenges, not unlike those faced by other high-priced legacy technology vendors. It [...]
Updated: 2012-02-07 06:49:30
I wasn’t the only one to be dubious about Forrester Research’s Hadoop taxonomy (or lack thereof). GigaOm’s Derrick Harris was as well, and offered a much superior approach of his own. In Derrick’s view, there’s Hadoop, Hadoop distributions, Hadoop management, and Hadoop applications. Taking those out of order, and recalling that no market categorization is [...]
Updated: 2012-02-07 03:18:25
My clients at Odiago, vendors of WibiData, have changed their company name simply to WibiData. Even better, they blogged with more detail as to how WibiData works, in what is essentially a follow-on to my original WibiData post last October. Among other virtues, WibiData turns out to be a poster child for my views on [...]
Updated: 2012-02-06 13:27:06
I talked with the Sumo Logic folks for an hour Thursday. Highlights included: Sumo Logic does SaaS (Software as a Service) log management. Sumo Logic is text indexing/Lucene-based. Thus, it is reasonable to think of Sumo Logic as “Splunk-like”. (However, Sumo Logic seems to have a stricter security/trouble-shooting orientation than Splunk, which is trying to [...]
Updated: 2012-02-06 05:16:20
Forrester has released its Q1 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions. (Googling turns up a direct link, but in case that doesn’t prove stable, here also is a registration-required link from IBM’s Conor O’Mahony.) My comments include: The Forrester Wave’s relative vendor rankings are meaningless, in that the document compares apples, peaches, almonds, and peanuts. [...]
Updated: 2012-02-02 04:00:24
I checked in with James Phillips for a Couchbase update, and I understand better what’s going on. In particular: Give or take minor tweaks, what I wrote in my August, 2010 Couchbase updates still applies. Couchbase now and for the foreseeable future has one product line, called Couchbase. Couchbase 2.0, the first version of Couchbase [...]
Updated: 2012-01-30 18:32:12
MIT’s Center for Civic Media has a number of exciting upcoming events focusing on, well, civic media, citizen journalism, and other related topics. During this Thursday’s lunch, Jeff Moriarty will talk about digital initiatives at The Boston Globe. (RSVP for food at least 24 hours prior to the event via the form on the event [...]
Updated: 2012-01-29 20:42:31
bunnie Huang, who got in a bit of a quagmire a few years back when hacking an Xbox while an MIT student, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (commonly known as the EFF) are coordinating a petition to the Library of Congress to attempt to change the part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) that [...]
Updated: 2012-01-25 16:47:59
I believe IT departments should support and encourage departmental analytics efforts, where “support” and “encourage” are not synonyms for “control”, “dominate”, “overwhelm”, or even “tame”. A big part of that is: Let, and indeed help, departments have the data they want, when they want it, served with blazing performance. Three things that absolutely should NOT [...]
Updated: 2012-01-24 14:42:34
Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on March 7. An IM chat with a reporter resulted, and went something like this. Reporter: [Care to comment]? CAM: SQL Server is an adequate product if you don’t mind being locked into the Microsoft stack. For example, the ColumnStore feature is very partial, given that it can’t be [...]
Updated: 2012-01-18 17:02:59
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is getting blasted all over the Internet. Even so, one of its major dangers has not yet been widely discussed. People seem to realize that SOPA can create censorship by governments, or businesses, or as collateral damage when governments and businesses pursue other interests. But they may not yet grasp [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 10:44:41
In case you missed it, Sarah Lacy has launched Pando Daily, aka “Spawn of TechCrunch”. It has a clear mission statement, which she phrased as the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle and mentor/investor/board member Mike Arrington simply called to be the paper of record for Silicon Valley [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 08:04:58
This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era Historical notes on analytic terminology (in which many terms used in this post are defined) Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption (this post) What set off my “history of analytics” posting kick [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 08:01:20
This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era (this post) Historical notes on analytic terminology Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption Sometimes, what people describe as being “New, new, new!!!” in analytics has actually been happening since before they were [...]
