Does Google’s Knowledge Graph have a ‘facts’ problem?
Does Google’s Knowledge Graph have a ‘facts’ problem?: Maybe. It might, of course, be unwise for a single short response at the top of a set of search results to even try to ‘answer’ a question when we think, theorise or hypothesise towards an answer, rather than knowing it. I’m not suggesting, for a moment, that Google’s current […]
Amazon iterates, Google partners
Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform. AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped […]
When things go wrong
In technology, as in so much else, things go wrong all the time. Web sites go down, companies lose your data, and more. We all know this and – to greater or lesser degrees – broadly accept that it will eventually happen to us. The real trick, often, isn’t to prevent everything going wrong but to […]
Money for IaaS, money for streaming data
$83 million for Digital Ocean, with its bare-bones spin on cloud-based infrastructure… and $24 million for Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. Digital Ocean’s not an AWS-killer (and doesn’t think it is, either), and Kafka addresses a rather specific set of use cases around messaging between devices and/or application components… but both are solid pieces of […]
Open Source Software and the US Government
Open Source Software and the US Government: “…it has been determined that — in general — Members and staff in the U.S. House of Representatives, when conducting official business, now have a choice between using proprietary and closed technology and open source solutions that are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective.” That this is news, […]
Big telcos with cloudy pretensions
Two stories in the past week, to remind us that big telecoms incumbents have the customer relationships, the brand recognition, the data centres, the network and the ambition to offer cloud services. These are normally aimed at their existing customers, particularly big enterprises with existing co-lo relationships to these telcos. They’re also, normally, aimed at […]
McKinsey explains machine learning to execs
McKinsey explains machine learning to execs: Machine Learning is part of a broader conversation around Artificial Intelligence and related themes, which has recently begun to (re-)emerge from the labs and enter mainstream technology conversations. The terms are horribly abused, and mostly badly misunderstood, but there is clearly something afoot. And with good reason. These tools […]
Big business still builds data centres
451 Research has a new report out this morning, as part of its ongoing Voice of the Enterprise: Datacenters series. I’ll probably dig into the report’s results in more detail elsewhere, but this graphic seemed noteworthy for today’s Thought for the Day: (Source: 451 Research) 25% of the 560 respondents would consider building a new […]
Data archiving with Blu-ray
Data archiving with Blu-ray: Silicon Angle was amongst the sites reporting last week’s acquisition of Optical Archive Inc… by Sony. The company built a storage system based upon Blu-ray disks, and Sony clearly sees an opportunity to extend the life and value of the blu-ray format it created. According to [Optical Archive founder Frank] Frankovsky, […]
Basho extends
Basho, the company behind NoSQL database Riak, announced the Basho Data Platform yesterday. Riak, like so many other NoSQL/ NewSQL/ xSQL tools, was designed to be excellent… at addressing a relatively small problem. Basho (and others in the space) recognise the issue, and know that substantial enterprise adoption requires either a tool that can address […]
Size Matters, sort of
The Amazon Web Services cloud sees ten times as much usage as the next fourteen competitors combined, according to a new report from industry research firm Gartner. At least according to Business Insider’s reporting of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for public cloud. And over at VentureBeat, HP’s public cloud is now too small to […]
Rackspace
Rackspace results came in below analyst expectations. Shares ‘tumbled,’ according to The Register. Over at TechCrunch, they ‘plunged.’ Yup. They tumbled and plunged all the way to exactly where they were last week. (Source: Google) More interesting, for me, was the company’s emphasis on its increasingly important business supporting customers of other people’s clouds. Unsurprisingly, Barb Darrow […]
Qlik gets cloudy, puts DataMarket to work
Qlik gets cloudy, puts DataMarket to work: On-premise visual analytics provider, Qlik, has rolled out a cloud-enabled offering that “supports the creation of dashboards and storyboards, and offers seamless sharing and interactivity, allowing users to share Qlik Sense applications” As Maria Deutscher notes in her SiliconAngle piece, this is partly about playing catch-up to the […]
DigitalOcean does Germany
DigitalOcean does Germany: DigitalOcean is very much an outlier. It calls itself a cloud infrastructure provider but essentially it is a traditional hosting provider (although, I’ll have to admit, there is very little to differentiate between a hosting provider and a raw cloud infrastructure vendor). Whatever it does, it is doing it well. DigitalOcean […] […]
451 Research on IaaS
This diagram, from a recent 451 Research report, is intriguing. AWS is top of the heap, “used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers in the study (57%) and is also cited as the most important IaaS provider by 35% of these current IaaS customers.” But look at Rackspace, ahead of AWS on ‘promise’ and only just […]
