Virginia Backaitis News & Articles

If there’s one thing that Enterprise Content Management industry veteran Whitney Bouck has heard plenty of rants about, it’s content silos. Or in simpler terms, not being able to easily access and/or share documents, files or other information, stored in one place from another.

Now that the Jersey Shore is in its final season and we’ve become desensitized to the catfights on the Housewives of Wherever series, how about a reality show featuring the rivalries in Enterprise Computing?

The big news out of Oracle OpenWorld this year is that Oracle is now the most comprehensive cloud provider on the planet with the most enterprise-grade applications, the most complete platform and the most modern socially enabled technology and applications.

And, yes, that is the company’s marketing jargon. Digest it as such.

What if someone told your CEO that he was making vital business decisions based on five percent of the useful data available to the company?

Needless to say, he wouldn’t be happy.

It’s a pretty safe bet that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff won’t be going to Oracle’s OpenWorld next week, but he’ll certainly be on the minds of many.

What do sales people gripe about? Aside from the crappy economy, customers who won’t make decisions, and lousy commissions; there’s managing and getting action on the overload of documents and approvals involved in a typical sales cycle.

Bait me and I’ll bite. Say the word “surprise” and I’ll want to know what it is, immediately. Give me a reason to believe that something unexpected might happen, and I’m going to dig. It’s my nature. I’m a headhunter and a journalist, research and curiosity are in my blood.

Enough said. 

Enterprise technology is entering the “fun to watch” era. September’s playlist centers around online enterprise file-sync-n-share. This week’s disruptor: Salesforce.com, and they haven’t even made a formal announcement yet. 

For all the hype around Big Data, the numbers of organizations outside of the Internet and Advertising industries who leverage it to the hilt are still fairly few.

Syncplicity wants to be the place that enterprise users go to sync, share, access and protect their files. The SaaS start-up that storage giant EMC acquired in May has been working in overdrive to achieve its mission.

There’s a difference between a big pile of data and Big Data.

It’s hard to believe that this needs to be said. But try this. Ask someone what Big Data is and see if you don’t hear words like petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte and the like dominate their answers. Most common definitions of Big Data revolve around quantity and data/information storage.

Content Management from its earliest days has been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. This was long before there were laptops, before email, before the web, before smartphones, before e-Readers, before tablet computers, before whatever comes next. 

Everyone is getting it on with Big Data.

It's over. The social networking phenomena is coming apart at the seams. At least that's what Eric Savitz says. He covers the intersection of tech and investing for Forbes.

Does the athlete who wins the most Olympic medals also win the most social media clicks per day?