Companies are increasingly collecting amounts of digital information that are so large as to be unwieldy. It's no surprise that finding a way to securely store, categorize and recall this information efficiently is a huge advantage for any enterprise or organization.

The growth of information has introduced an entirely new category of software in the big-data arena, which includes a variety of databases, processing engines, and applications. The main objective of all of these tools is to make data more malleable and consumable so that it can be used in an easier way.

This week, CERN, the European Organization … Read more

Hot on the heels of Google's acquisition of German bargain site DailyDeal this week, a new report from private company research firm CB Insights reveals that the multitude of daily-deal sites will continue to contract via mergers and acquisitions but the valuations of the sites will decline very quickly.

According to the report, since their peak hit just two quarters ago in Q1 2011, the Price per Subscriber and Price per Voucher Sold multiples paid in private company M&A transactions have declined 36 percent and 40 percent respectively in Q3 2011.

The decline appears to be being … Read more

The Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, today announced total membership of more than 200, up from 65 in just over three months. New members include CA Technologies, DataStax and Jaspersoft.

I spoke with Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of Cloud for Red Hat, who told CNET that infrastructure as important as virtualization needs an open alternative. And Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has emerged as a strategic initiative at many large companies, including Intel and HP. KVM is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware that provides for multiple virtual … Read more

This week Opera Solutions, a provider of "big data" analytics tools, announced that the company has taken in an $84 million investment to expand its rapidly growing business. The investment round, the company's first, was led by Silver Lake Sumeru, with participation from Accel-KKR, Invus Financial Advisors, JGE Capital Management, and Tola Capital.

Founded in 2004, Opera has grown from 10 people to more than 600 staffers globally with development locations in New York, Shanghai, and New Delhi. The staff includes 180 scientists working to solve data-oriented challenges.

I spoke with CEO and founder Arnab Gupta today … Read more

The Google+ team today announced the launch of its public data APIs. These APIs allow you to retrieve the public profile information and public posts of Google+ users in order to share content, profiles, and conversations across applications.

The news is significant. As part of the evolution of any modern Web property--especially those geared toward the social sharing of information, an API (application programming interface) is key to adoption.

"Google+ gives users full control over their information, supporting everything from intimate conversations with family to public showcases and debates," the company said in a statement. "This initial … Read more

Despite the threat of another recessionary period, Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Jason Maynard believes that IT budgets will hold up through 2011 and that the summer spending spottiness hasn't translated into meaningful expense cutting.

In today's e-mail newsletter, Maynard and team make the case for a positive call on IT spending despite the global macroeconomic fear permeating the market. This is based on first-hand qualitative feedback the team aggregated from CIOs and the 100 largest enterprise hardware and software vendors.

Obviously there is still a scenario where we have a repeat of the dramatic spending cutback of … Read more

A recent Gartner survey found that business process management spending will increase significantly this year, with 54 percent of medium and large companies planning a 5 percent increase or more in their BPM spending this year and 20 percent of companies planning to up their BPM spending by at least 10 percent.

This week, venture-backed startup BonitaSoft announced a new $11 million round of financing to take advantage of the growth in the market.

Gartner explained the market growth by pointing to increased interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, which offer a cheaper entry point, and a shift toward funding BPM … Read more

It's fair to say desktop virtualization has had a checkered past.

As far back as 2005, VMworld had presentations on the topic of desktop virtualization, also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. By 2007, VMworld had developed a desktop virtualization track with a number of deep-dive technical sessions. In June of 2008, IDC issued a report on "The Promise Of Desktop Virtualization" touting how desktop virtualization can help rein in the costs of managing and maintaining PC infrastructures.

In February of 2009, CRN reported Gartner's predictions that by 2013, between 10 percent and 15 percent of enterprise PCs would be virtualized. … Read more

As big data becomes more and more top of mind, a number of new companies have popped up to support Hadoop, the leading open-source platform for data-intensive distributed applications. One of the newer entrants is Hortonworks, a company spun out of Yahoo, with a $15 million-plus cash infusion from both Yahoo and Benchmark Capital.

Last week I sat down with Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler to understand how the company intends to differentiate from other vendors such as Cloudera, MapR, and the many as yet unlaunched companies that venture capitalists are still funding.

Hadoop itself was initially developed at Yahoo by … Read more