At the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last month in Orlando, we heard many of the same grumblings we've been hearing about Microsoft for years now: They don't care about on-premises servers. They're leaving IT administrators in the dust and hanging them out to dry while forcing Azure and Office 365 content on everyone. They're ignoring the small and medium business.
1.The concept is still quite new. The term data lake, credited to Pentaho CTO James Dixon, has been bandied about for several years. But the idea of data lakes as corporate resources is still in its infancy, according to IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni. A data lake is defined as a massive--and relatively cheap--storage repository, such as Hadoop, that can hold all types of data until it is needed for business analytics or data mining. A data lake holds data in its rawest form, unprocessed and ungoverned.
Big Data. Predictive analytics. Real-time. Actionable insight. There's a buzzword smorgasbord around the use of data to derive value. It doesn't help that sometimes the benefits can be esoteric, or at least hard to visualize. But sometimes the benefits are crystal clear, as in the fight against sepsis, one of the leading killers in the US.
Today it's easy to transfer money, make payments, and buy goods and services in countless ways outside the walls of a bank or retailer. In fact, physical visits to banks are down 30 percent since last year, and the use of mobile banking apps is up 33 percent, according to a new survey from Chase. Banks are embracing new technologies and evolving consumer habits to engage the next generation of customers.
At this past spring's Ignite -- Microsoft's new one-stop software conference that combined all of the other domestic technical events into one giant pot of soup -- the software giant revealed some interesting details about SharePoint 2016, the next release of the on-premises version of its collaboration and Office development platform.
Studies show that around 40% of products fail. But what if product designers could understand what features are most and least popular, which components tend to fail sooner than others, and how customers actually use products versus how designers think they use them? And, what if product developers could then utilize these insights to develop products that perform better, potentially cost less and, most importantly, are aligned with actual customer needs?
At the end of 2014, Microsoft bought Acompli, creators of a popular email app that it quickly rebranded as Outlook. The familiar name doubtless drew in more users, but it also gave IT teams a set of expectations about the security and management options a product called Outlook would have.
From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services.
"Epic" was the word Regina Dugan used to describe her team's research and development projects that included enlisting "Fast and Furious" movie franchise director Justin Lin to help create the next-generation movie experience. Dugan, vice president of Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, delighted thousands of developers in May at Google's annual I/O conference as she orchestrated demonstrations of applied technologies that seemed to originate from just over the horizon of most humans' imaginations.
Traditional document applications are still among many workers' core computing apps, but the cloud-based Google for Work and Microsoft's Office 365 suites facilitate more collaborative, real-time workflows. The differences between Google Docs and Word Online are sometimes indiscernible, but for the millions of people who spend hours with the platforms each week, small variances can be a big deal.
It's hard to imagine an open source project more likely to fail than one that attempts to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft's Office productivity suite.
When 80 percent of employees say mobile technology is critical for getting their job done, but the same number say they haven't asked their IT department for the apps they need because they don't think they'd get what they need, that's a sure sign of trouble.
Alongside the news that the Microsoft teams that make devices like Surface and Surface Hub will now be in the same division that makes the operating system on which they run, Microsoft's latest reorg moves Dynamics to the Cloud & Enterprise group (Microsoft Dynamics is the company's line of ERP and CRM applications). That shifts it from the Applications & Services division that builds productivity products and cloud services like Office 365, and puts it alongside Azure, SQL Server, Intune, Power BI, Visual Studio and BizTalk.
How many slaves work for you? If you own electronics, jewelry or sporting goods; drink coffee or tea; eat food or wear clothes, it's more than you think. It's probably a lot. If you dig deep enough into the supply chain of many of the products we use and consume every day, you'll find forced labor and child labor.
"Size clearly matters. You probably couldn't run an XP (Extreme Programming) Project with a hundred programmers. Nor 50. Nor 20, probably. Ten is definitely doable ..." – Kent Beck, "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change," 1st Edition, [Publication date: 2000]