At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual week-long conference in San Francisco for customers and partners, Andy Flower, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the emerging challenges facing IOUG members, the group's plans for the year ahead, including additional training and certification around Exadata, and how Oracle's engineered systems approach is being received. "The overall need for analytics, the growth of data, and the managing and processing of more and more data - those areas are the central themes for us," Flower noted.
Posted October 19, 2011
More than 600 data managers and professionals completed the IOUG's 2011 survey on database growth. All respondents to this IOUG ResearchWire survey were entered in a sweepstakes drawing to win an Apple iPad. Have you ever wondered if anyone actually wins these prizes?
Posted October 19, 2011
Noetix Corp., a provider of business intelligence software and services for enterprise applications, has introduced NoetixViews for Oracle E-Business Suite version 6.1 which includes new views and key performance, security, and administration enhancements for improved operational reporting. For Noetix customers who have created parent-child hierarchies for use in Oracle Financial Statement Generator (FSG) reports, the latest release of NoetixViews now extends these hierarchies to the customer's BI tool of choice via Noetix Generator.
Posted October 19, 2011
Melissa Data Corp, a provider of contact data quality and integration solutions, introduced its SmartMover Component for Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) at the PASS Summit 2011. SmartMover allows users to update U.S. and Canadian customer records with new move updated addresses, helping businesses stay in contact with their customers, while reducing wasted time, money, and postage on undeliverable-as-addressed mail. SmartMover is a "unique component for SSIS," Greg Brown, director of marketing for Melissa Data, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 18, 2011
Teradata, a data analytic data solutions provider, announced the latest update to its flagship data warehouse product, as well as new features in its data warehouse appliance. Teradata Database 14 is designed as the analytical engine for powering all of the vendor's "purpose-built" platform family members - from enterprise data warehouses to appliances. "We're including big data application support," says Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs at a briefing at the vendor's recent user group event.
Posted October 18, 2011
Improving Oracle PL/SQL Performance - New Webcast from DBTA and Quest Software on Thursday, October 27
Posted October 18, 2011
The Oracle Applications Users Group is continuing its Back to Basics theme, Mark C. Clark, president of the OAUG, told 5 Minute Briefing during Oracle OpenWorld, with education and networking, enabled by smaller regional events and online learning opportunities, in addition to its continued participation in larger events such as OpenWorld and COLLABORATE. Upcoming Connection Point events include the "OAUG Connection Point-EPM/BI/R12.1 Upgrade" which will be held November 15-16, 2011, in Atlanta; and the "OAUG Connection Point-Dubai 2012" will be held March 14-15, 2012, in Dubai, UAE.
Posted October 18, 2011
Savvis, a CenturyLink company, launched Savvis Symphony Database, a cloud-based database platform, at Oracle OpenWorld. Symphony Database provisions everything needed for a complete, secure database solution, with just a few clicks. According to the vendor, client advantages include no software licensing or hardware provisioning, and performance levels can be scaled - both up and down - based on business needs, without any downtime, providing performance guarantees and reduced costs compared to hosted database solutions. Users can select from Oracle Enterprise 11G RAC or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 for the underlying technology.
Posted October 18, 2011
A new version of LookupPoint for Oracle E-Business Suite was showcased by Spanish Point Technologies at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. This latest version enables information aggregation from on-premise Oracle database systems and applications in the cloud, allowing organizations to create consolidated views of information from cloud application such as Salesforce.com and on-premise enterprise applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite.
Posted October 18, 2011
Alchemy Solutions, Inc. has announced that NeoKicks, its CICS modernization tool, can now push CICS applications to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud environment. NeoKicks V3.1 runs on Windows servers and is the first CICS migration framework to run natively on Windows Azure without the use of virtual machines.
Posted October 17, 2011
IBM unveiled what it calls the industry's most advanced cloud services and software designed from the ground up for enterprise clients. New IBM SmartCloud services and capabilities provide greater choice, security and portability for cloud implementations, the company says. IBM also says it plans to support about 200 million users by the end of 2012 as clients shift core applications and processes to the IBM SmartCloud.
Posted October 17, 2011
IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Platform Computing, a privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Platform Computing is a provider of cluster and grid management software for distributed computing environments. The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Posted October 17, 2011
Red Hat, Inc. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a provider of open source unstructured data storage solutions, for approximately $136 million in cash. With this acquisition, Red Hat says it will improve how enterprise IT manages the explosion of big data, whether on-premise or spanning into the public cloud; and expand into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, delivering open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.
Posted October 17, 2011
IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Q1 Labs, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based provider of security intelligence software. The move aims to accelerate IBM's efforts to help clients secure their enterprises by applying analytics to correlate information from key security domains and creating security dashboards for their organizations. Financial terms were not disclosed. Following the close of the acquisition, Q1 Labs will join the newly-formed IBM Security Systems division. The new division will be led by Brendan Hannigan, CEO of Q1 Labs.
Posted October 17, 2011
UNICOM Systems, Inc., a provider of IBM mainframe, System i, Unix and Open Systems management solutions, has acquired the Boston-based international software company, iET Solutions, LLC from Platinum Equity, LLC. The acquisition will boost UNICOM's reach in the IT Service Management (ITSM) and software asset management market space. New solutions coming out of the acquisition will complement UNICOM's existing ITPowerPac sites.
Posted October 17, 2011
Motorola Solutions, Inc., a provider of enterprise communication products, software and services, has announced the availability of a web-based application framework designed to enable businesses to develop and deploy web-based applications on existing Motorola Windows Embedded Handheld (formerly known as Windows Mobile) and Windows Embedded Compact (Win-CE) mobile computers, as well as Motorola's recently announced ET1 Android-based enterprise tablet. Motorola RhoElements is the first of several product releases targeted at developers within Motorola's customer base and PartnerEmpower ecosystem, the vendor says.
Posted October 17, 2011
SmartBear Software announced two toolsets designed to provide software development and QA teams with more granular control over agile test management and release management activities, while enhancing test reuse. ALMComplete 2011 is a SaaS-based and on-premise application lifecycle management tool, and QAComplete 2011 is a QA and test management tool.
Posted October 17, 2011
Emulex Corporation announced its new LightPulse 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), Emulex's ninth generation of Fibre Channel adapters, delivering over one million I/O per second (IOPS) on a single port, enabling high-performance I/O for high density, business-critical cloud and virtualized data centers. The new LPe16000 HBAs are based on the Emulex Engine (XE)201 I/O Controller (IOC), a quad-port converged fabric controller that supports 16GFC and up to 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE)-based network convergence.
Posted October 17, 2011
New DBTA Webcast: No SQL - The Time is Now
Posted October 15, 2011
Nearly half of respondents to a recent Unisys Corporation online poll indicated they are more likely to ask their company IT department to fix problems with the personally owned consumer devices they use at work than they are to troubleshoot the issues themselves or seek support from the device manufacturer.
Posted October 15, 2011
Unisys China subsidiary has been named systems integrator to support the expansion and modernization of Chengdu Airport, including work on the airport's new Terminal 2. Terminal 2 will provide additional capacity for the busiest airport in Western China, and China's sixth largest airport overall, which predicts annual passenger volume will grow 53 million by 2015.
Posted October 15, 2011
Melissa Data Corp, a provider of data quality and integration solutions, has announced a suite of expert professional services to help establish a business case for data quality, examine the root causes of data quality problems, implement ongoing monitoring of improvements, and successfully integrate Melissa Data's software solutions. Especially useful for companies with limited resources, Melissa Data Professional Services aims to bring development and data management teams together with data quality experts from Melissa Data to accelerate adoption of address management solutions seamlessly into business processes with minimal disruptions to realize immediate return on investment. Melissa Data Professional Services will include Product Training; Proof-of-Concept (POC) Development; Data Quality, Governance and Integration Consulting; as well as Custom Development Services on an as-needed basis, Greg Brown director of marketing for Melissa Data, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 15, 2011
Application Security, Inc. (AppSecInc), a provider of database security solutions, is introducing a new enterprise data security capability, DbProtect Active Response. "Active Response allows us to react in real time to policy violations with a tailored approach that is governed, based on specific events and policy violations we see and the environment that we are operating in," Josh Shaul, CTO of AppSecInc, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Different customers in different systems will define that kind of thing in their own way, but what is most typical is administrative users accessing and modifying data in the systems they manage." That type of activity is usually out of bounds and is the kind of thing that organizations will typically define as a policy violation - whether it is intentional or accidental - and want to respond, he notes.
Posted October 11, 2011
Noetix Corp., a provider of business intelligence software and services for enterprise applications, has introduced NoetixViews for Oracle E-Business Suite version 6.1 which includes new views and key performance, security, and administration enhancements for improved operational reporting. For Noetix customers who have created parent-child hierarchies for use in Oracle Financial Statement Generator (FSG) reports, the latest release of NoetixViews now extends these hierarchies to the customer's BI tool of choice via Noetix Generator.
Posted October 11, 2011
At Oracle OpenWorld, Fusion-io announced the next evolution of its ioMemory platform for application acceleration and data center optimization. "With the introduction of this next platform we are stepping down to 2x nanometer NAND flash which is doubling the capacity point," David Flynn, Fusion-io CEO and chairman, tells 5 Minute Briefing, explaining that as the capacity point is expanded, opportunities are opened up for it to be used in new areas. "People want to get the most capacity that they can because it enables them to do things that they couldn't otherwise do."
Posted October 07, 2011
Joe Clabby authors a comprehensive overview on the SHARE website this week focusing on the issue of the IT Skills Gap. While the need for mainframe professionals remains high, for instance, the supply of young mainframers remains stubbornly short. Certainly, the supply of mainframers coming out of universities is hamstrung by a number of specific factors including an uninformed perception by students about the platform's ongoing importance, a dearth of curriculum and faculty covering the subject in many computer science programs, and a lack of outreach by industry into local computer science departments to foster both academic and internship focus.
Posted October 07, 2011
During a keynote presentation last week at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, the new Oracle Big Data Appliance, an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g, was announced by Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Product Development, Oracle.
Posted October 05, 2011
At Oracle OpenWorld, F5 Networks, Inc., announced that its BIG-IP solutions have achieved Oracle Database and WebLogic Ready status through the Oracle PartnerNework (OPN), demonstrating that F5 has fully tested and supports BIG-IP version 10 products on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle WebLogic 11g Release 1. The BIG-IP product family consists of physical and virtual solutions that provide integrated application delivery services, such as acceleration, security, access control, and high availability.
Posted October 05, 2011
arcplan Teams Up with Simba Technologies to Bring Oracle Customers OLAP Analysis with MDXarcplan, a provider of business intelligence, dashboard, corporate performance and planning software solutions for desktop and mobile use, and Simba Technologies Inc., an expert on data connectivity, have announced a partnership that will connect Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP with arcplan 7 to simplify access to real-time business critical information and reduce IT costs and complexity. The offering will be available in mid-October with the latest version of arcplan Enterprise 7.
Posted October 05, 2011
Allround Automations has released a free plug-in that directly connects its PL/SQL Developer IDE with Red Gate Software's Oracle database deployment tools. "Combining PL/SQL Developer and the Deployment Suite for Oracle from Red Gate gives any database developer an extremely powerful environment for development and deployment," Tom Harris, Red Gate's product manager for Oracle tools, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 05, 2011
Jaspersoft, a maker of business intelligence (BI) software, has released Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite 4.2 featuring mobile BI capabilities designed to make applications easier to build for developers and easier to use for executives and managers on the move. Jaspersoft 4.2 delivers what the company describes as the industry's first open source mobile BI iOS software development kit (SDK) for embedding BI in native mobile applications as well as for building native mobile BI applications. Jaspersoft 4.2 also includes a full-featured, touch-screen BI environment accessible through a mobile browser for rapid deployment.
Posted October 04, 2011
Ingres Corp. has been rebranded as Actian Corporation and unveiled a new strategy to enable companies to develop Action Apps which it describes as lightweight, consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. "The name change is symbolic of a completely new approach," Greg Wood, Actian CFO, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Ingres is becoming Actian to take action on big data, powered by VectorWise, the world's fastest data analytics engine."
Posted October 04, 2011
ParAccel, a provider of a high performance analytic database, and MicroStrategy, a provider of business intelligence software, have announced that they have extended their strategic partnership. The alliance builds upon a recent announcement that ParAccel's analytic acceleration technology will be a core component of MicroStrategy's social media analytics applications as well as a high performance option for MicroStrategy Cloud customers. To support these applications, ParAccel has invested dedicated resources, provided comprehensive access to its software, and committed to delivering specific product enhancements that will optimize the integration of ParAccel's analytic engine with MicroStrategy's products and offerings.
Posted October 04, 2011
DataStax, a provider of solutions based on the open source Apache Cassandra database platform, announced it is shipping an enterprise database platform designed to enable the management of both real-time and analytic workloads from a single environment. The new platform, DataStax Enterprise, is designed to leverage the features of Cassandra to provide performance enhancements and cost savings over traditional database management solutions, the vendor claims.
Posted October 04, 2011
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 during a presentation at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. Based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, the engineered system exploits the same parallelism and data compression provided by Oracle's other engineered systems, the Exadata and Exalogic, said Ellison, and, importantly, provides a smooth upgrade path to the SPARC Solaris installed base.
Posted October 04, 2011
Compuware Corporation introduced a load testing solution that it says enables organizations to find and fix performance and scalability problems across the entire application delivery chain. Compuware Gomez 360° Web Load Testing brings together two testing solutions - Gomez Web Load Testing and dynaTrace Test Center Edition - into one integrated offering.
Posted October 03, 2011
TIBCO Software Inc., an integration platform provider, announced the general availability of a portfolio of on-demand offerings enabling users to create, publish, and share customized business intelligence (BI) dashboards and advanced analytics applications via the cloud. TIBCO Silver Spotfire 2.0 is available as a tiered collection of packages that offers tiered capabilities, scalability and pricing. No IT department involvement is required, the vendor also claims.
Posted October 03, 2011
HPCC Systems from LexisNexis Risk Solutions has released the source code for its HPCC Systems platform to the open source community, enabling developers to leverage and further enhance the platform. To manage, sort, link, join and analyze billions of records within seconds, LexisNexis developed a data-intensive supercomputer that has been proven, and has evolved for over a decade, with customers who need to process large volumes of data. Built on a high performing computer clustering technology, HPCC Systems is an open source solution designed to help large organizations process and deliver big data.
Posted October 03, 2011
This week Symantec Corp. is announcing version 6.0 of the company's storage management and high availability product set, intended as the cornerstones of private cloud infrastructures. The release spans multiple products in Symantec's portfolio, including its flagship Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0, and Veritas Operations Manager 4.1, all integrated to help IT organizations move confidently to a private cloud architecture.
Posted October 03, 2011
Red Lambda, Inc., a data management software company, announced an Early Release Program for MetaGrid, security and operational intelligence software powered by the company's AppIron Grid Platform. MetaGrid is designed to address the big data dichotomy faced by providers of IT, network and cloud infrastructures that generate up to petabytes per day of operational data. Red Lambda claims it is the first to combine leading-edge big data technologies to create a software platform designed to keep pace with the increasing volume, variety, and velocity of IT operational data and find the threats and opportunities buried within it.
Posted October 03, 2011
CA Technologies announced "day one" support for IBM's next generation z/OS V1.13 across its line of mainframe management software solutions, including CA Mainframe Chorus and CA Mainframe Software Manager (MSM).
Posted October 03, 2011
Rocket Software, Inc., an application modernization vendor, announced the availability of a new application modernization suite, now based on the open source Eclipse development environment, and offering new features and functions, including support for Java in CICS environments, and support for System z specialty engines.
Posted October 03, 2011
Pervasive Software Inc., a provider of solutions for cloud-based and on-premises data analysis and integration, has announced that Pervasive DataRush for Hadoop v5.1 is a Cloudera Certified Technology. "With this certification, users have the assurance that our highly parallel big data engine has been tested and validated to work with Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop," says Mike Hoskins, Pervasive CTO and general manager, Pervasive Big Data Products and Solutions.
Posted September 29, 2011
A new survey of contact center leaders reveals that the average amount of idle time per day per employee is nearly an hour, as respondents report 49 minutes daily per agent on average. Knowlagent, provider of an agent productivity solution for 10 million call center agents, has released this and other findings from its 2011 Customer Contact Center Productivity Survey. Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, conducted the survey in August, which included input from 312 contact center executives, managers or supervisors. The Knowlagent survey sought to understand contact center management's biggest challenges, and how they are leveraging technology, measuring productivity and performance, and delivering training.
Posted September 29, 2011
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 during a presentation at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. Based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, the engineered system exploits the same parallelism and data compression provided by Oracle's other engineered systems, the Exadata and Exalogic, said Ellison, and, importantly, provides a smooth upgrade path to the SPARC Solaris installed base.
Posted September 28, 2011
At Sybase TechWave, Sybase launched Sybase PowerBuilder 12.5, the second .NET release of its rapid application development tool. PowerBuilder 12.5 provides a fast and cost-effective solution for creating modern and visually appealing business applications on the Microsoft Windows 32 ((Win32) and .NET Frameworks.
Posted September 28, 2011
Direct Computer Resources, Inc., a provider of data privacy, file management and application development testing software, has been granted a patent in connection with the data obfuscation technology used in its DataVantage Global software. The software is used for the management and testing of databases and database applications, data migration, and the protection of sensitive data.
Posted September 28, 2011
At SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas, SAP AG announced two new solutions built on SAP HANA, the company's in-memory computing platform. The two new solutions - SAP Smart Meter Analytics software powered by SAP HANA and SAP COPA Accelerator software - were developed by SAP product and design teams working in collaboration with customers. According to SAP the new applications will provide users with real-time insight into "big data," allowing them to leverage large amounts of information for analysis, planning, and forecasting and simulations in a more fluid, natural way versus traditional approaches.
Posted September 28, 2011
Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has announced the general availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.7. Sybase ASE 15.7 provides a cost-efficient relational database management system (RDBMS) for managing very large data sets for the most demanding applications. The new version of the enterprise data management solution saves disk space, increases performance and scalability on parallel hardware, and efficiently manages unstructured data.
Posted September 28, 2011
Entrinsik Inc., a developer of web-based operational reporting and analysis software, plans to offer a solution that will assist Datatel users in migrating their Informer UniData-based mappings and reports to a SQL environment. The utility is slated for general release January 2012.
Posted September 28, 2011