Oracle plans to sue whistleblower Svetlana Blackburn for malicious prosecution, the company said Thursday.On Wednesday, Blackburn -- a senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business -- said in a lawsuit she was terminated from her job for refusing to go along with cloud-computing accounting principles she considered unlawful.Blackburn alleges that upper management was trying to fit "square data into round holes" in a bid to boost the financial reports for Oracle's cloud services business that would be "paraded" before company leaders and investors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next version of Microsoft's SQL Server relational database management system is now available, and along with it comes a special offer designed specifically to woo Oracle customers.
Until the end of this month, Oracle users can migrate their databases to SQL Server 2016 and receive the necessary licenses for free with a subscription to Microsoft's Software Assurance maintenance program.
Microsoft announced the June 1 release date for SQL Server 2016 early last month. Among the more notable enhancements it brings are updateable, in-memory column stores and advanced analytics. As a result, applications can now deploy sophisticated analytics and machine learning models within the database at performance levels as much as 100 times faster than what they'd be outside it, Microsoft said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The digital transformation train may have already left the station, but for companies with legacy mainframe applications, it's not always clear how to get on board. On Wednesday, IBM announced an acquisition that could help.The PC giant will acquire Israel-based EZSource, it said, in the hopes of helping developers "quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code."EZSource offers a visual dashboard that's designed to ease the process of modernizing applications. Essentially, it exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can focus their efforts accordingly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners paid about 22 percent too little for Dell when they took the company private in 2013 and will have to pay millions of dollars more to shareholders who opposed the deal, a Delaware court ruled on Tuesday.Though the buyers paid $24.9 billion, or $13.75 per share, the company's actual fair value at the time was $17.62 per share, according to Delaware Vice Chancellor Travis Laster.The decision comes in response to a lawsuit brought by a number of Dell investors who felt shortchanged by the deal. Through what's known as an appraisal suit, they asked the Chancery Court to determine the fair value of their shares at the time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Marketing-software maker Marketo has agreed to be acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for $1.79 billion, the company announced Tuesday.Marketo shareholders will receive $35.25 in cash per share -- a sum the company says represents a 64 percent premium over its closing price earlier this month, before reports emerged that it was exploring strategic alternatives.The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016. Marketo's headquarters will remain in San Mateo, California, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's not your average company that can trace its origins back to a nineteenth-century Russian tsar, but then, Sberbank is no average financial institution.Established through a decree by Emperor Nikolai I in 1841, Sberbank is Russia's oldest bank and has played a long and storied role in the nation's history. Today, with more than 16,000 branches in all 83 constituent entities of the Russian Federation -- traversing 11 time zones -- it serves roughly 70 percent of the Russian population.Therein lie the roots of the bank's very modern challenge.Whereas once virtually all transactions were conducted in person during office hours and on bank premises, the arrival of the Internet turned that pattern on its head. No longer constrained by branch operating schedules or the on-site availability of bank officers, customer-service demands skyrocketed as consumer expectations extended 24/7.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's not your average company that can trace its origins back to a nineteenth-century Russian tsar, but then, Sberbank is no average financial institution.Established through a decree by Emperor Nikolai I in 1841, Sberbank is Russia's oldest bank and has played a long and storied role in the nation's history. Today, with more than 16,000 branches in all 83 constituent entities of the Russian Federation -- traversing 11 time zones -- it serves roughly 70 percent of the Russian population.Therein lie the roots of the bank's very modern challenge.Whereas once virtually all transactions were conducted in person during office hours and on bank premises, the arrival of the Internet turned that pattern on its head. No longer constrained by branch operating schedules or the on-site availability of bank officers, customer-service demands skyrocketed as consumer expectations extended 24/7.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You can't always bring customers to your best customer-service tools, but now you can bring those tools to them thanks to a new addition announced Wednesday for Salesforce's Service Cloud.Dubbed Service Cloud Lightning Snap-ins, the new offering allows organizations of any size to take key support features from Salesforce's Service Cloud and "drop" them into their websites or mobile apps. Case-management and live-chat capabilities can now be added to mobile and Web apps, for example, and a tap-to-call feature is available for Android and iOS.A new module enabling two-way video chat, meanwhile, allows customers and agents to see each other. A customer could also use a smartphone's front-facing camera to show the agent the problem at hand.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rise of the citizen data scientist has placed a new premium on easy-to-use analytics tools, and on Tuesday Datameer announced a fresh version of its namesake platform designed with that imperative in mind.New in Datameer 6 are a simplified front end as well as an expanded tool for selecting the best processing framework for the job.Datameer 6's new front end combines the previously linear steps of data integration, preparation, analytics and visualization into a single screen. Shifts in context, tools or teams are no longer required every time a data change is needed, the company says. Instead, users can toggle among different phases of the workflow, with visualization along the way to illustrate the effects any changes have made.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's no secret that analytics is eating the enterprise world, but if there's anything in perpetually short supply, it's speed. Enter Cray, which on Tuesday unveiled a new supercomputing platform designed with that in mind.Dubbed Urika-GX, the new system is the first agile analytics platform to fuse supercomputing with an open, enterprise framework, Cray said.Due to be available in the third quarter, Urika-GX promises data scientists new levels of performance and the ability to find insight in massive data sets quickly. The system is tuned for highly iterative and interactive analytics, and integrated graph analytics offers rapid pattern matching.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Online reviews have already transformed the way people choose everything from restaurants to respiratory therapists, and now SaasGenius wants to do the same for enterprise software in the cloud.This week the company will launch a beta version of its service, and it invites participants to submit reviews of business software in 12 different categories.In the past, businesses looking for software relied primarily on word-of-mouth reviews, but SaasGenius aims to tap the model that's become so common on the consumer side.“We all now rely heavily on websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor in our personal lives -- these sites feature trusted reviews to help us make quick, easy purchase decisions," said Tom Gorski, cofounder and CEO at the firm. "Even employees in large companies now expect a more customer-like online research and buying experience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's an update available for Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2016, and it brings with it a brand-new tool to help companies tap the Internet of Things for their customer-service efforts.Announced on Monday, the Spring 2016 Wave of Dynamics CRM adds Connected Field Service, a new tool companies can soon use to leverage the potential of predictive maintenance via IoT devices.Available as a preview in June, Connected Field Service continuously monitors IoT-enabled devices for anomalies, generating alerts that trigger automated actions or service tickets and workflow according to service level agreements. Service technicians with the right skills and tools are then matched against the service requirement based on availability and proximity and routed to customer locations for preventive action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's a good chance your tastebuds would tell you when you're drinking stale beer, but now science has come to the rescue to spare them that pain.You can thank the chemists at Spain's Complutense University of Madrid, who have developed a sensor and Android app that can tell you when you shouldn't even bother having a sip.To monitor a beer's freshness, brewers often use chromatography techniques to measure indicative chemicals including furfural, a compound that appears during the aging process and gives beer a stale taste. The problem is, those techniques can be time-consuming and expensive.In this new work, published recently in the journal Analytical Chemistry, the researchers devised a system including sensor discs that detect the presence of furfural in beer. Made from a polymer similar to what's used to manufacture contact lenses, the sensors change color from yellow to pink when they come into contact with a beer containing furfural.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Marketers can tap virtually limitless volumes of data about customers' online activities, but the offline world isn't nearly as forthcoming. That's where SAP aims to help.The company on Thursday unveiled a new service that offers demographic data in near real time about the people currently inside a store or at a particular venue or event. Called SAP Digital Consumer Insight, the service taps consumers' mobile data to deliver details on where they're coming from, their age groups and gender, and the devices they're using. Marketers can also benchmark one store location against another, compare two potential new locations, or see how well their marketing efforts stack up against the competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The notion of online privacy has been greatly diminished in recent years, and just this week two new studies confirm what to many minds is already a dismal picture.First, a study reported on Monday by Stanford University found that smartphone metadata -- information about calls and text messages, such as time and length -- can reveal a surprising amount of personal detail.To investigate their topic, the researchers built an Android app and used it to retrieve the metadata about previous calls and text messages -- the numbers, times, and lengths of communications -- from more than 800 volunteers’ smartphone logs. In total, participants provided records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The notion of online privacy has been greatly diminished in recent years, and just this week two new studies confirm what to many minds is already a dismal picture.First, a study reported on Monday by Stanford University found that smartphone metadata -- information about calls and text messages, such as time and length -- can reveal a surprising amount of personal detail.To investigate their topic, the researchers built an Android app and used it to retrieve the metadata about previous calls and text messages -- the numbers, times, and lengths of communications -- from more than 800 volunteers’ smartphone logs. In total, participants provided records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dealing with obstacles is an inevitable part of life, and it looks like robots may be surprisingly adept at applying creativity to the challenge.Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University developed software that not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter but also revealed considerable creativity in solving problems. Their new study is due to be presented Thursday at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Sweden.A research team led by Siddhartha Srinivasa, CMU associate professor of robotics, challenged HERB -- his lab's two-armed mobile robot -- with a pile of clutter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAP has updated its flagship Hana in-memory computing platform with a raft of new features designed to make IT simpler while giving organizations a better handle on their data.The updates, announced Tuesday at the company's annual Sapphire Now conference in Florida, include a new hybrid data management service in the cloud and a new version of the company's Hana Edge edition for SMBs."We’ve taken an already rock solid platform and further hardened security, enhanced availability, unified the development and administration experience, and expanded advanced analytic capabilities," Michael Eacrett, vice president of product management for SAP, wrote in a blog post detailing the new release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's not often easy for line-of-business managers to get a real-time view of their budgets and spending, but a new app from SAP aims to change that.Based on SAP's Hana Cloud Platform, the app pulls data from core financial reporting systems and makes it searchable, so that line managers can do ad hoc spend analyses and other on-the-fly calculations.Called SAP RealSpend, the app lets managers drill down and perform a fine-grained analysis of actual and future spending. It can also deliver related forecast and budget plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enabling e-commerce capabilities isn't a trivial matter for companies small or large, but SAP has a new cloud tool it thinks will help SMBs in particular. Called SAP Anywhere, it's designed specifically for companies with 10 to 200 employees.SAP Anywhere aims to help small and midsize businesses build a website or online store, create marketing campaigns, sell products and take payments, manage inventory, and analyze business performance, all from a mobile phone or tablet."More than 28 million small firms in the United States need to market goods online and satisfy customers' desire for a digital buying experience," said EJ Jackson, senior vice president and general manager for SAP Anywhere. "At the end of the day, company size is irrelevant to the consumer."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes