enterprise

Adobe yesterday completed its $240 million takeover of content management system vendor Day Software.

With the acquisition now a done deal, Day will operate as a new product line within Adobe's Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit. Day Chief Executive Officer Erik Hansen will report directly to Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager of the unit. The rest of Day's senior management have also joined Adobe.

Due to remain in its home base of Switzerland, Day makes a content management system geared for enterprise customers. The company's flagship software suite, called CQ5, offers Web content, digital … Read more

Two years ago, casino giant Harrah's Entertainment needed to cut costs. One of the first places managers looked was cell phones.

As the company evaluated its business, one of the quickest and least painful ways to reduce its yearly budget by more than $1 million a year was to change its cell phone policy. Specifically, the company started allowing its employees to use their own cell phones for work.

"We looked at the cell phone market penetration, which is close to 100 percent, and we realized that everyone already has their own cell phone," said Mark Cross, … Read more

Research in Motion's BlackBerry may soon lose its lock on the enterprise market, as companies look to add support for more consumer friendly smartphones--like Android and iPhone devices--and the BlackBerry's vaunted security features become less unique.

RIM has built its business on providing mobile e-mail and messaging services to corporate users. Thousands of companies use BlackBerry exclusively for mobile communications. And the company dominates the market with well over 60 percent market share. Much of the corporate loyalty stems from the company's reputation for strong device management and security. But a major shift is underway as IT … Read more

In 2010, the talk about a "big data" trend has reached a fever pitch. "Big data" centers around the notion that organizations are now (or soon will be) dealing with managing and extracting information from databases that are growing into the multi-petabyte range.

This dramatic amount of data has caused developers to seek new approaches that tend to avoid SQL queries and instead process data in a distributed manner. These so-called "NoSQL," such as Cassandra and MongoDB databases, are built to scale easily and handle massive amounts of data in a highly fluid manner.

And while I am a staunch supporter of the NoSQL approach, there is often a point where all of this data needs to be aggregated and parsed for different reasons, in a more traditional SQL data model.

It occurred to me recently that I've heard very little from the relational database (RDBMS) side of the house when it comes to dealing with big data. To that end, I recently caught up via e-mail with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, whose company provides services, support, and training around the open-source relational database PostgreSQL.

Boyajian stressed four points:

1. Relational databases can process ad-hoc queries

Production applications sometimes require only primary key lookups, but reporting queries often need to filter or aggregate based on other columns. Document databases and distributed key value stores sometimes don't support this at all, or they may support it only if an index on the relevant column has been defined in advance.

2. SQL reduces development time and improves interoperability

SQL is, and will likely remain, one of the most popular and successful computer languages of all time. SQL-aware development tools, reporting tools, monitoring tools, and connectors are available for just about every combination of operating system, platform, and database under the sun, and nearly every programmer or IT professional has at least a passing familiarity with SQL syntax.

Even for the types of relatively simple queries that are likely to be practical on huge data stores, writing an SQL query is typically simpler and faster than writing an algorithm to compute the desired answer, as is often necessary for data stores that do not include a query language. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The drama was kept to a minimum tonight at the opening event of Oracle OpenWorld, which featured the two players starring in a still-developing Silicon Valley soap opera: Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.

HP typically sends its top executives to keynote the annual Oracle conference here, but there was potential for awkwardness after HP forced former CEO Mark Hurd to resign last month amid scandal and he fled into the arms of his good friend Larry Ellison's company, which happens to be a partner and competitor of HP. Before hiring him, Ellison publicly lashed out against HP's board of … Read more

The nation's largest wireless provider has paired up with one of the premier names in the enterprise space to bring business-grade security and management to handsets like the Droid 2, Droid X, and LG Ally. The move will give the carrier a leg up when it comes to attracting business customers who previously worried about security protocols, remote wiping, and general data encryption.

The new solution is based around two components: messaging and control. Good Mobile Messaging will provide personal information management (PIM) and enterprise-class e-mail and Good Mobile Control will allow for over-the-air and on-device encryption of enterprise … Read more

IBM's newest chip for mainframes boasts one of the highest speed ratings to date and will go into Big Blue's fastest mainframe computers.

IBM, no stranger to cutting-edge chip designs, will use the new 5.2GHz z196 processor in mainframes targeted at businesses managing huge workloads, such as large banks and retailers.

Why the need for more than 5GHz of speed, one of the highest frequencies of any commercial processor to date? IBM cites a study by Berg Insight, showing that the number of active users of mobile banking and related financial services worldwide is forecast to increase from 55 million in 2009 to 894 million in 2015. IBM's customers need all the horsepower they can get to handle these staggering data processing loads.

Big Blue's zEnterprise mainframe technology is the result of an investment of more than $1.5 billion in research and development for the zEnterprise line, as well as more than three years of collaboration with some of IBM's top clients around the world, the company said.

The processor itself packs in four cores, plus a respectable helping of DRAM--what IBM calls eDRAM--inside the processor module. Getting DRAM inside a processor module is quite a trick, as DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, is typically on a separate module inside a computer (just think of the RAM upgrade boards that plug into a PC's motherboard). The patented IBM eDRAM technology allows it to place dense DRAM caches inside its processors, which boosts performance.

Intel, by comparison, has its own very fast mainframe-class server processors, such as the Xeon X7560 processor, which integrates eight cores, in a 2.26GHz processor. Many consumer Intel chips also boast a new technology called Turbo Boost, which dynamically "overclocks" (speeds up) the processor to very high speeds, when needed by an application. (Intel also offers its 4-core Itanium 9300 "Tukwila" processor for high-end servers with 30MB of on-chip cache.) … Read more

Seagate and Samsung, the two major makers of hard drives and system memory, announced Thursday that they have entered into a joint development and licensing agreement.

Under this agreement, the two companies will develop and cross-license related controller technologies for solid state drives.

This is interesting; Samsung has released many consumer-grade SSDs, whereas Seagate has recently taken the route of hybrid drive with the release of the Seagate Momentus XT (500GB). The company's first attempt into the SSD market with the Pulsar drive didn't make much of a splash.

According to Seagate, however, the two companies aim to … Read more

Electronic payment systems continue to evolve, yet traditional checks (also spelled "cheques") remain critical to business and the global economy. Software like Evinco's ChequePrinting.Net 2.8.1 bridges the gap, combining the security and physical record of payment of checks with electronic efficiency and advanced management capabilities in a networked database environment. It lets you print and manage all elements of a check and record and manage the transactions in one interface. It includes some useful extras, too, such as a payment voucher template.

When you first run ChequePrinting.Net, a wizard prompts you to connect … Read more