You may not yet be familiar with Okta, an on-demand identity and access management service company founded by former Salesforce.com executives and backed by big-time venture investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate. But as cloud services continue to find their way into the enterprise, there is a good chance it will be noticed by companies that will have the need to support identity and access management across enterprise/cloud borders.

While this is an early market, the premise of Okta (and others such as Symplified) is that the next generation of IT infrastructure is being built … Read more

Last week I reconnected with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group and a recently named IBM Fellow, about what's going on in the realm of big data.

When I first met Jonas, back in June of 2010, he was focused on how companies are dealing with the deluge of information associated with Big Data. His focus hasn't changed, but he told me his perspective on how we make sense of data continues to evolve -- especially as we move in and out of demand for real-time versus batch data processing.

New Big Data tools … Read more

Editors' note, March 22 at 1:14 p.m. PT: It seems the skeptics may have been right on this one. Gizmodo is now reporting that the purported birdman confessed on Dutch TV that this was indeed a hoax. Our original story follows, with some earlier updates.

If Red Bull doesn't actually give you wings, maybe this guy can.

Dutch mechanical engineer Jarno Smeets recently posted a video of what he says was his first successful flight with his homemade bird wings. Smeet's efforts take cloud computing to a (literally) whole new level, as the wings purportedly rely on an Android-powered HTC Wildfire S smartphone to process arm acceleration and compute the motor output.

The phone is connected to a microcontroller that is, in turn, connected to a Nintendo Wii Remote to measure acceleration and other flight parameters. … Read more

When Google announced in 2010 that it would be "sunsetting" the Google Wave product, there were a lot of theories as to why the search giant was bailing out on the product.

Most people couldn't figure out what Wave was for, and Google did a lousy job of explaining it for them. Add to that the fact that Facebook and Twitter social mechanics became the norm and Wave didn't have much of a chance with its experimental user interface.

However, an e-mail sent to users today with a typo in the From address--"Google Wage&… Read more

Display-advertising company Flite today unveiled Flite Platform 3, marking a shift away from static ads to one based on a real-time, app-driven world. Flite 3 enables two fundamental innovations: real-time updates to live campaigns and the ability to integrate Web applications directly into online ad units.

This means that advertisers can tweak campaigns based on real-time analysis of how users are responding to ads, including interaction rates and how much time users spend seeing an ad, but also the ability to edit an ad on the fly based on what the analytics data shows the advertiser.

Flite 3 also enables … Read more

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on … Read more

While cloud computing and virtualization have transformed server infrastructure dramatically, it's the rise of solid-state drive/flash technologies that have enabled a storage renaissance.

Flash storage will continue to bring a much needed boost to the enterprise landscape. From Fusion-io's IPO last year to the recent launches of a host of venture-backed startups like Nutanix and Tintri, there's a lot going in the world of flash storage.

As an increasing number of applications and databases are virtualized and deployed to the cloud, traditional disk-based storage arrays are creating serious performance bottlenecks that are rendering them increasingly irrelevant. … Read more

What started out as a research project at IBM has become not only an unbeatable "Jeopardy" champion but also a new line of business for Big Blue. And it's coming to the cloud.

IBM's Watson project proved a big hit when it appeared as a contestant on "Jeopardy" one year ago and proved that machines are indeed smarter than man (I for one welcome our robot overlords.)

And now, IBM is taking Watson to the next level, having created a commercial business unit working to offer Watson both on-premise and as a hosted cloud … Read more

Security and network management vendors Prolexic and Arbor Networks recently reported that distributed-denial-of-service attacks are on the rise. What can we do to make prevention a forethought?

According to Prolexic Chief Technology Officer Paul Sop, the recent trends include a shorter attack duration, but a bigger packet-per-second attack volume. This "bigger packet-per-second attack volume" is likely going to be generated by a DDoS (distributed denial of system), which is a coordinated attack from lots of dispersed nodes usually with a few central controllers.

A recent high-profile example was the hacker group "Anonymous" allegedly using the LOIC … Read more