Oracle president Mark Hurd says new account teams with single-contact accountability are improving customer satisfaction, but he has no kind words for SAP. Interop 2014: 8 Hot Technologies (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Oracle president Mark Hurd threw verbal rose petals on the feet of consumers during his keynote talk on the InformationWeek Conference on Tuesday, while giving competitors SAP and Rimini Street the thorns. Hurd hit on Oracle’s cloud and engineered systems strengths, as is typical in his public appearances, but he also broke new ground in keeping with questions from InformationWeek editor-in-chief Rob Preston at the difficulty Oracle customers have in facing only one person, as a result of company’s 80-plus acquisitions during the last six years. “The client-facing piece is the most important issue that we’ve had, but we believe that the folks who represent Oracle should know their products,” Hurd said. “After I got to the corporate three or four years ago, we did not have single accountability for... Read More »

Amazon’s new Fire TV device and software aims to offer gaming and streaming content on your front room television. At a different event Wednesday, Amazon finally revealed the small black box it has been engaged on to fit underneath your lounge television: The $99 Amazon Fire TV, that’s available now. With Fire TV, the corporate says that it was trying to solve numerous issues of similar devices, including search and function issues, coupled with closed ecosystems. “How can we make the complexity disappear?” the corporate asked, and Fire TV is outwardly the reply. According to Amazon, the fireplace TV comes with a quad-core processor and a dedicated GPU, the type that you would usually find in smartphones. It has 2GB of RAM, dual-band Wi-fi, and it’s roughly .7-inch thin — shorter than a dime, as demonstrated during its unveiling. It also comes with a handheld remote control which might be controlled together with your voice via a microphone. The Fire TV is able to streaming... Read More »

Is PaaS only a feature of general-purpose infrastructure-as-a-service or a special layer of goods within the cloud? Experts debate the definition of PaaS at Cloud Connect.   Interop 2014: 8 Hot Technologies (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) In a panel on “The way forward for PaaS in an IaaS World” at Cloud Connect Summit, colocated with UBM Tech’s Interop Las Vegas, there has been a shocking amount of disagreement on how to find platform-as-a-service as a sort of cloud computing. Each member of the panel, which included several well-known cloud spokesmen, had another definition. Mark Russinovich, a technical fellow at the Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that’s integrated with a runtime environment, rather than code this is dropped right into a virtual machine that’s sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy type of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something concerning the environment it’s running in.” Margaret Dawson, HP’s cloud evangelist and VP of... Read More »

Emboldened by enterprise adoption of BYOD, many employees are beginning to reach toward the cloud. Here’s a way to gain the fee and efficiency advantages of non-public cloud services while offsetting the hazards. Interop 2014: 8 Hot Technologies (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies have had a huge impact on enterprises recently, driven largely by employees’ desire to use their own mobile phones, tablets, and laptops at work. When it’s done right, the use of personal devices offers workers countless benefits, including flexibility, continuous access to data, higher productivity, and less dependence on central IT. BYOD can also be heavily disruptive to IT processes and policies, and it’s taken some time for enterprises to embrace the change. BYOD is acceptable in many workplaces, but phones, tablets, and laptops are still provided by IT in most enterprises. To minimize risk and ensure that employees use these devices appropriately, CIOs and CTOs must carefully consider and address the following factors: Industry-specific regulatory and... Read More »

Google’s latest updates to Gmail, Docs, and more assist you to stay organized and improve productivity. Google had a hectic begin to 2014: It acquired Nest Labs for $3.2 billion, launched Chromebox for meetings, and dropped Google Drive storage prices. But between its biggest headlines, Google also rolled out a handful of updates to its Google Apps productivity suite. The Google Apps suite, that’s now utilized by greater than 5 million businesses and 50 million people, added a handful of recent features and capabilities that may assist you be more productive and stay organized. Its most up-to-date updates include a library of add-ons for Docs and Sheets users, a brand new design in your Promotions tab in Gmail, additional Google+ controls, and new photo-editing capabilities in Google Slides and Drawings. Here’s a glance at Google Apps’ newest features, plus tips for a way you may make the foremost of them. 1. Use add-ons in Docs and Sheets.In March, Google launched add-ons, new tools created by... Read More »