Market Dynamics

It's no secret that companies of all kinds use third-party software in their own products. Mobile OEMs are a great example--new phones often contain code from of hundreds of code suppliers--both open source and proprietary.

A new "Software Integrity Risk Report" commissioned by software analyst Coverity and conducted by Forrester Research points to a growing discrepancy in the quality and security standards businesses are applying to their internally developed code versus code supplied by third-parties.

This can lead to an increased risk of software defects, translating to an increased risk of software failure and impact to brand … Read more

Marketers have become more realistic about how to best engage their audiences, according to the results of a new IBM survey.

The State of Marketing 2011 report presented today at a marketing event in Boston covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes. Results reveal that marketers have become more practical about their expectations for both mobile and social marketing, as well as the realization that their efforts are strongly tied to IT, especially when it comes to making marketing campaigns actionable for the end-user.

From the survey results:

Private company research firm CB Insights is set to release a new report today on the state of venture capital financing for the first quarter of 2011. The short version: things are looking good, if a bit frothy, with Q1 registering $7.5 billion of venture capital funding invested in 738 deals.

In relation to the last quarter of 2010, there were only three more deals in Q1 of 2011, and both quarters included roughly half of Groupon's $1 billion funding, which doesn't quite explain how Q1 saw roughly $1 billion more in financing for roughly the same … Read more

The Hadoop open-source project for distributed compute processing continues to be one of the most interesting projects for managing the vast amount of data being analyzed and collected in a wide variety of scenarios.

Today, Cloudera, a provider of Hadoop data management software and services, is set to release a major release of its open source software distribution--Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH), including Apache Hadoop v3.

Cloudera's CDH3 distribution is an integrated set of components and functions that interoperate through standard APIs and manage required component versions and dependencies.

CDH3 is an integrated stack that includes not just software … Read more

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Linux Operating System, the nonprofit Linux Foundation has produced an infographic and video that reminds us how much of an impact the open source operating system has had on the world.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last two decades, Linux is part of pretty much every technology ecosystem--mobile (Android), Web (Google), consumer (TiVo), and powers a huge amount of the Internet itself. And it continues to grow, both as an enabler of new services in the cloud and as the operating system that powers huge corporate … Read more

Cisco Systems, one of the world's largest technology companies, signaled last week that it has more than a passing interest in cloud infrastructure by submitting a design for OpenStack: Network as a Service (NaaS).

Cisco's proposal is not the first for NaaS, but I believe it signifies an important acceptance not just of a change to the way that we consume compute and networking but a shift in how big companies will make OpenStack both the literal and metaphorical Apache Web server for cloud services.

The networking component of both public and private clouds has been woefully underserved, … Read more

Tintri this week is coming out of stealth mode with a new storage system designed to solve the unique storage problems of virtual machines (VMs). Founded by the former head of VMware R&D, the company is also announcing it raised $17 million from venture firms NEA and Lightspeed Partners.

Storage has long been a lucrative market, heavily dominated by just a few players. The introduction of a virtualization-oriented solution brings new blood and a new approach to a rather stagnant industry. And, considering the enormous growth of virtualization, an approach that IT staff should certainly be interested in. … Read more

IBM is putting its expertise in data analysis and business process to work under a new initiative called "Smarter Commerce" to help make sense of what consumers want and help vendors to better target offers.

"Smarter Commerce" is a reaction to the shift in the dynamics of commerce as a whole, with the customer leading the path to sales, according to Yuchun Lee, VP of enterprise commerce for IBM. The newly packaged offerings are designed to help businesses engage customers with a higher level of relevancy, putting the customer back to the center of the business … Read more

On March 3, database vendor EnterpriseDB is set to release the results of its survey conducted at the JavaOne conference last September in San Francisco.

More than 600 IT professionals completed the survey, the results of which provide a bit of insight into community sentiment regarding Oracle's control of open-source projects Java and MySQL.

While opinion polls generally tend to be fairly unscientific--especially when sponsored by rival vendors--the results seem to indicate the IT community is wary of Oracle's plans.

According to the results, 46 percent of respondents believe that open-source projects such as MySQL will stagnate under … Read more