Tony Baer

To date, Big Storage has been locked out of Big Data. It’s been all about direct attached storage for several reasons. First, Advanced SQL players have typically optimized architectures from data structure (using columnar), unique compression algorithms, and liberal usage of caching to juice response over hundreds of terabytes. For the NoSQL side, it’s been about cheap, cheap, cheap along the Internet data center model: have lots of commodity stuff and scale it out. Hadoop was engineered exactly for such an architecture; rather than speed, it was optimized for sheer linear scale. Over the past year, most of the major platform players have planted their table stakes with Hadoop. Not surprisingly, IT household names are seeking to somehow tame Hadoop and make it safe for the enterprise. Up ' til now, anybody with armies of the best software engineers that Internet fir... (more)

Oracle Fills Another Gap in Its Big Data Offering

When we last left Oracle’s big data plans, there was definitely a missing piece. Oracle’s Big Data Appliance as initially disclosed at last fall’s OpenWorld was a vague plan that appeared to be positioned primarily as an appliance that would accompany and feed data to Exadata. Oracle did specify some utilities, such as an enterprise version of the open source R statistical processing program that was designed for multithreaded execution, plus a distribution of a NoSQL database based on Oracle’s BerkeleyDB as an alternative to Apache Hive. But the emphasis appeared to be extractio... (more)

Progress Scoops Up Savvion in BPM Race

Is it more than coincidence that IT acquisitions tend to come in waves? Just weeks after IBM's announcement to snap up Lombardi, Progress Software today responds with an agreement to put Savvion out of its misery? In such a small space that is undergoing active consolidation, it is hard not to know who's in play. Nonetheless, Progress's acquisition confirms that Business Process Management (BPM)'s pure play days are numbered, if you expect executable BPM. The traditional appeal of BPM was that it was a business stakeholder-friendly approach to developing solutions that didn't rely... (more)

Big Data Consolidation Enters Home Stretch as Teradata Buys Aster Data

At this point, probably at least 90 percent or more of analytic systems/data warehouses are easily contained within the SQL-based technologies that are commercially available today. We’ll take that argument a step further: Most enterprise data warehouses are less than 5 terabytes. So why then all the excitement about big data, and why are acquisitions in this field becoming almost a biweekly thing? To refresh the memory, barely a couple weeks back, HP announced its intention to buy Vertica. And this morning came the news that Teradata is buying the other 89 percent of Aster Data ... (more)

HP Does a 180 – Now It's Apotheker's Company

HP chose the occasion of its Q3 earnings call to drop the bomb. The company that under Mike Hurd’s watch focused on Converged Infrastructure, spending almost $7 billion to buy Palm, 3COM, and 3PAR, is now pulling a 180 in ditching both the PC and Palm hardware business, and making an offer to buy Autonomy, one of the last major independent enterprise content management players, for roughly $11 billion. At first glance, the deal makes perfect sense, given Leo Apotheker’s enterprise software orientation. From that standpoint, Apotheker has made some shrewd moves, putting aging ent... (more)