Successful Workplace

Too many business people see the Cloud as a way of outsourcing IT’s function to a cheaper, newer set of applications. That’s not surprising when you consider that Cloud vendors are going straight to business owners the world over and offering to give their technology tools a radical facelift at a steeply discounted price. No […]

There’s no doubt the world is enthralled by the promises of cloud computing and why not? Freeing up enormous capital expenditures in favor of subscription-based services for functionality someone else has to worry about? What’s not to like? Well, the fact that most SaaS applications are merely silos of their own, not significantly improved from […]

In case you missed 60 Minutes on CBS last night, there’s a new challenge to privacy that is coming faster than people realize and was made more urgent by the terror attack in Boston a month ago. The 60 Minutes piece started with the following: The ability of computers to recognize faces has gotten a […]

I finally did it…I broke my longstanding relationship with Bose sound systems and bought my first Sonos equipment…starting out with the Bridge and one Play 3 speaker. I brought it home and had it running in ten minutes. No wires, and even though I had a manual, I didn’t need it. Like my all of my […]

Day 2 of the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Conference in London and I can’t help but ask myself, “Does the combination of cloud, mobile, social and data usher in the eventual end of the stand alone application? There’s a frank reality that these four ‘movements’, called the Nexus of Forces by Gartner, intersect […]

The Gartner AADI Conference in London kicked off this morning with a keynote on how to bring IT organizations into the future. The first speaker, Gartner’s David Mitchell Smith, started off by asking the question, “Are you comfortable?” The crowd didn’t respond for the most part but Smith didn’t wait very long before following up […]

I made great money in college recruiting people for focus groups. Those were tough days for students in a state (New York) where the minimum wage was only $3.35 an hour. Instead, I was making $25 an hour working in a phone bank that called and convinced specific demographic groups to spend a few hours […]

There’s an increasing perception across the enterprise that the role of the CIO as we know it won’t survive the decade. This isn’t anecdotal evidence, either, as respected institutions like the Harvard Business Review, the Economist and others are publishing studies that show that the average CEO is unhappy with the status quo of their […]

After so many years in technology, I find it hard to see the newest trends as completely new. I’ve become a cynic about hype. Things have cycled so many times in my career that every new fad reminds me of  highly touted ‘movements’ like CORBA and artificial intelligence, and once-hot platforms like MySpace and AOL. […]

Cloud is red hot. You can’t attend a conference or take two steps out of your house without hearing something about cloud computing. It isn’t a shocker, as the concepts behind Cloud form a compelling argument for the way business needs to be run. It lets anyone, regardless of upfront spend and infrastructure, be a […]

Matt Schumpert took the stage at the InterOp Big Data Workshop in Las Vegas yesterday to talk about the myths and realities of Big Data. Matt is Director of Solutions Engineering at Datameer and has customers that include Visa, Sears, and three out of the worlds largest five banks. He’s an expert on Big Data […]

The InterOp Big Data Workshop ended today with a panel covering Big Data into the Future, led by VentureBeat Founder and CEO Matt Marshall. The lineup was made up as follows: Justin Erickson, Senior Product Manager, Cloudera Ajit Gupta, CEO, Aryaka Stefan Groschupf, Co-founder and CEO, Datameer, Inc Bruno Aziza, VP, Worldwide Marketing, SiSense Getting into it Marshall started off by pointing out […]

The Big Data Workshop at InterOp Las Vegas wrapped up the morning with a presentation on Big Data requirements by John West, CTO and Founder of Fabless Labs. John kicked off with the challenge of having your enormous data set all ready to work with when you discover any one of the following problems: Your […]

Sometimes, just sometimes, what happens in Las Vegas shouldn’t stay in Las Vegas. That was clearly the case this morning when TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn took the stage to talk about the myths and realities of Big Data. In Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart Rich or Pretty, Quinn provided his perspective on Big […]

Data scientists are in short supply! Or at least that’s a headline you can find nearly everywhere. There are people trying desperately to hire them and also people trying hard to jump into the perceived gap and become one. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of skepticism over whether the role is real or a function of all […]

It seems big data means something different to everyone. In the great debate/hype about big data, there’s no lack of opinion on the topic and it seems to mostly depend on an individual’s product, skill set and business challenges. This ambiguity shares a great deal of the blame for why the term is often polarizing […]