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

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

If there is one thing that startups can learn from the rise of Facebook it's that making sense of data you collect is where the money is.

Lots of companies collect data and do nothing meaningful with it. But thanks to new tools and the realization that knowing more about what your users are doing is the way to monetize, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage the information collected.

In case you've been living in a cave, Facebook has filed to go public at an enormous valuation, based largely on the fact that the company has … Read more

Like newspapers to the Web, many business software vendors are now reluctantly dragging themselves into the cloud-based enterprise. If they aren't nimble enough, a new generation of companies is ready to take their place.

While major enterprise IT vendors continue to deliver so-called features that keep users tied to their desks and legacy software, companies like Box and others have figured out that the industry is changing right before our eyes. The new enterprise takes the best aspects of consumer applications to make business-critical data available anywhere, anytime.

The majority of the fawning stories about startups that come out … Read more

Open source is winning the Java application-server war in the age of the cloud, according to a new survey.

Web application performance company New Relic released results of its recent study on commercial vs. open-source Java application server usage among enterprises. The result: open source is winning by an overwhelming margin when it comes to web applications.

New Relic surveyed 1,000 customers to get some data on the state of open-source in business today. According to the results, over 80 percent of enterprise users across five main industries (business software, consumer internet, ecommerce, gaming, and social web) are using … Read more

A tool from Visual.ly that analyzes and visualizes users through Twitter posts demonstrates one way make easy-to-understand visualizations of big data.

One example of the increasingly important trend of combined analysis and visualization is evident in Visual.ly Labs' Twitterize yourself application, which provides a good representation of how companies can use large data sets to quickly identify user characteristics to increase engagement or upsell goods and services.

I spend most of my time in my day job looking at data across the extended software development life cycle (design, develop, deploy, maintain, etc.), looking for the patterns that show … Read more