Virginia Backaitis News & Articles

Big Data is the new oil, the new gold, the new Californium Isotope … add your own metaphor. You’ve heard it said before, and you’ll hear it said again and again. 

Here’s the scenario: a scantily clad woman wearing a string bikini approaches your table while you’re stuffing yourself at an all-you-can-eat brunch and tries to sell you a membership to a gym.

Wrong time, wrong place, and just plain odd, right?

Big Data makes big promises, but it’s hard to leverage and slow to deliver. That’s the sentiment of many marketing execs who see the possibilities but have yet to realize big rewards.

Larry Ellison has a dream. And at the moment it might be less about winning new customers than keeping the ones he already has.

Big whoop, there’s a "Facebook phone.” That was my first reaction to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week.

Enterprises are hell-bent on managing data -- and managing data where there is no inherent data lifecycle management framework to leverage is a bear. A bear that most Enterprises prefer not to wrestle with.

Too often when a woman in tech opens her mouth, she gets slammed.

SAP’s Big Data Transition Strategy will be studied in MBA programs a few years from now. The company is disrupting its industry with revolutionary solutions without disrupting its customers. Needless to say, that’s a hard thing to do.

There are people who have the time and talent necessary to stare at columns and rows of data, plug in variables and use sophisticated software tools to help them understand and solve problems and visualize results.

And there are people who don’t.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) managers typically struggle between two important imperatives -- delighting users and keeping corporate information assets safe and in compliance. Trying to do both at the same time has proven to be a frustrating experience, especially in a world where more and more work is being done collaboratively from anywhere, at any time, via any one of many devices (be they iPads, iPhones, tablets or Droids…). 

Not too long after the sun came up this morning, thousands of developers rushed out of bed to see what 10gen, the MongoDB Company, was rolling out to its community.

Aaron Levie’s timing could not have been better, though it was probably due more to coincidence than intention.

You can build the future, you can buy the future, or you can do both. Nearly all of the world’s big tech companies choose the latter. And it’s not that they lack the ability to be innovative or hire the best talent, but because as EMC Chairman Joe Tucci says, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” 

If Infochimps’ new CEO delivers half as well as he sells, then Fortune 500 companies will be lining up to move their data -- Big Data, streaming and still -- on to the company’s Infochimps Enterprise Cloud.

Surprise! Surprise! (But not really.) EMC today announced that it is spinning off a new company, Pivotal Initiative.