Say hello to Fedora 24, a Linux OS for a containerized worldImage by The Fedora ProjectFedora 24 is the first 2016 release from the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, and it made its debut on Tuesday. Included in the software are several key new features for enterprises. Here's a look at some of the highlights.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a well-known fact in the IT world: Change one part of the software stack, and there's a good chance you'll have to change another. For a shining example, look no further than big data.First, big data shook up the database arena, ushering in a new class of "scale out" technologies. That's the model exemplified by products like Hadoop, MongoDB, and Cassandra, where data is distributed across multiple commodity servers rather than packed into one massive one. The beauty there, of course, is the flexibility: To accommodate more petabytes, you just add another inexpensive machine or two rather than "scaling up" and paying big bucks for a bigger mammoth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a well-known fact in the IT world: Change one part of the software stack, and there's a good chance you'll have to change another. For a shining example, look no further than big data.First, big data shook up the database arena, ushering in a new class of "scale out" technologies. That's the model exemplified by products like Hadoop, MongoDB, and Cassandra, where data is distributed across multiple commodity servers rather than packed into one massive one. The beauty there, of course, is the flexibility: To accommodate more petabytes, you just add another inexpensive machine or two rather than "scaling up" and paying big bucks for a bigger mammoth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprises interested in tapping container technology now have a brand-new option for managing it: ContainerX, a multitenant container-as-a-service platform for both Linux and Windows.Launched into beta last November by a team of engineers from Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, the service became generally available in both free and paid versions on Thursday. Promising an all-in-one platform for orchestration, compute, network, and storage management, it provides a single "pane of glass" for all of an enterprise's containers, whether they're running on Linux or Windows, bare metal or virtual machine, public or private cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has made no secret of its AI ambitions, and on Thursday it announced the next step in its bold plans to realize them: a brand-new research group in Europe focused squarely on machine learning.Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ever since its beta launch two years ago, x.ai's "Amy Ingram" virtual assistant has been scheduling meetings through Google Calendar. Now, the bot -- along with her gender opposite, Andrew Ingram -- can work with Office 365 and Outlook.com, bringing the promise of automated scheduling to a vastly broader audience.“We knew from the start that enabling Amy and Andrew to work across the Outlook.com and Office 365 calendars would be one of the first things we did once we had trained the machine to schedule meetings nearly autonomously,” said Dennis Mortensen, x.ai's founder and CEO.The wider reach means x.ai can now target its beta service at a potential 90 million U.S. knowledge workers, the company reckons, who schedule roughly 10 billion meetings a year. The technology is due out of beta this fall. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SugarCRM has put AI at the core of its product plans and is working on a new intelligence service along with a Siri-like agent named Candace.Tapping the company's recent acquisitions of Stitch and Contastic, the new technology will be designed to help businesses spend less time entering data into their customer relationship management software and more time learning from and acting upon it.SugarCRM is scheduled to demonstrate the new capabilities Wednesday at its SugarCon conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a rare consumer today who doesn't use a mobile video and messaging app like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Vine, but such capabilities are still few and far between on the enterprise side.So argues Samba Tech, a Brazilian company that on Wednesday set out to fill that gap with a free mobile video app called Kast.Samba Tech is an independent distributor of online videos in Latin America, and it's gathered US $3 million in funding to support Kast's U.S. launch. It's also partnered with Microsoft and built Kast on top of Azure.Essentially, the company hopes to outdo Slack as the enterprise messaging platform of choice, becoming the corporate world's equivalent of Snapchat. Kast aims to go beyond tools like email, text, and chat and allow users to bring audio and video posts directly to select teams and channels, both at the office and on the go.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
5 reasons Microsoft is buying LinkedIn, in picturesImage by MicrosoftMicrosoft is making its biggest tech acquisition ever, spending $26.2 billion for enterprise-focused social networking company LinkedIn. Why did it do it? On Monday, Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner discussed five compelling reasons. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In pictures: 5 reasons Microsoft is buying LinkedInImage by MicrosoftMicrosoft is making its biggest tech acquisition ever, spending $26.2 billion for enterprise-focused social networking company LinkedIn. Why did it do it? On Monday, Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner discussed five compelling reasons. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's every marketer's goal to reach customers in the right place, at the right time, and with the right message, but the online world doesn't make that easy. A new tool announced Thursday uses machine learning to help.Called Lithium Reach, it aims to eliminate some of the guesswork inherent in marketers' jobs by recommending the best social content and the best time to publish it.The average consumer brand today has 55 social media accounts and nearly 45 employees managing them, according to Lithium Technologies, which acquired social-influence ranking site Klout back in 2014. The new Reach tool puts Klout's machine-learning algorithms to work in the hopes of making that process easier.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saying goes, and that's just as true in cybersecurity as it is in health. So believes Cylance, a startup that uses AI to detect and prevent cyberattacks.On Wednesday, Cylance announced that it just raised a whopping US $100 million in Series D funding. It will use the new infusion to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering programs.Dubbed CylanceProtect, the company's flagship product promises AI-based endpoint security while using a fraction of the system resources required by the approaches used in most enterprises today. Enabling that are technologies including machine learning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saying goes, and that's just as true in cybersecurity as it is in health. So believes Cylance, a startup that uses AI to detect and prevent cyberattacks.On Wednesday, Cylance announced that it just raised a whopping US $100 million in Series D funding. It will use the new infusion to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering programs.Dubbed CylanceProtect, the company's flagship product promises AI-based endpoint security while using a fraction of the system resources required by the approaches used in most enterprises today. Enabling that are technologies including machine learning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If there's an overriding trend in the world of enterprise software lately, it's democratization, as tools previously reserved for experts are put in the hands of average users. On Tuesday, Salesforce.com climbed on board with new software, training and support services that aim to help more users -- not just professional developers -- build applications for the Salesforce platform.There aren't enough trained developers to create apps for the business world, the company says, so it wants to help users in all parts of the organization make their own. More than 2.8 million developers have already built some 5.5 million apps based on the company's customer relationship management software, it says, and at its TrailheaDX developer event in San Francisco, it made several announcements to expand that further.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Tuesday stepped up its efforts to develop a brand-new computer architecture by inviting open-source developers to collaborate on the futuristic device it calls "The Machine."Originally announced in 2014, The Machine promises a number of radical innovations, including a core design focus on memory rather than processors. It will also use light instead of electricity to connect memory and processing power efficiently, HPE says.A finished product won't be ready for years still, but HPE wants to get open-source developers involved early in making software for it. Toward that end, it has released four developer tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Making sense of data can involve a wide variety of tools, and IBM is hoping to make data scientists' lives easier by putting them all in one place.
The company on Tuesday released what it calls Data Science Experience, a new development environment in the cloud for real-time, high-performance analytics.
Based on data-processing framework Apache Spark, Data Science Experience is designed to speed and simplify the process of embedding data and machine learning into cloud applications. Included in the new offering are tools such as RStudio and Jupyter Notebooks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new company launched Monday by former NASA chief Dan Goldin aims to deliver a major boost to the field of neural computing.KnuEdge's debut comes after 10 years in stealth; formerly it was called Intellisis. Now, along with its launch, it's introducing two products focused on neural computing: KnuVerse, software that focuses on military-grade voice recognition and authentication, and KnuPath, a processor designed to offer a new architecture for neural computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Quantum computing's full potential may still be years away, but there are plenty of benefits to be realized right now.So argues Vern Brownell, president and CEO of D-Wave Systems, whose namesake quantum system is already in its second generation.Launched 17 years ago by a team with roots at Canada's University of British Columbia, D-Wave introduced what it called "the world's first commercially available quantum computer" back in 2010. Since then the company has doubled the number of qubits, or quantum bits, in its machines roughly every year. Today, its D-Wave 2X system boasts more than 1,000.The company doesn't disclose its full customer list, but Google, NASA and Lockheed-Martin are all on it, D-Wave says. In a recent experiment, Google reported that D-Wave's technology outperformed a conventional machine by 100 million times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes