Join ConocoPhillips CIO Mike Pfister and InformationWeek editors for a live discussion of huge data and IT leadership issues on Tuesday. Big data and the web of items are sky high at the buzzword charts lately, but a glance into how ConocoPhillips uses both to extend natural gas production shows why these concepts are greater than hype. ConocoPhillips, the No. 2 company at the InformationWeek 500 ranking this year, put more sensors on its natural gas wells and took readings a lot more often — about every minute, in place of hourly or daily. The corporate tracks pressure and temperature data at different parts of a well to identify those who aren’t producing efficiently. ConocoPhillips had to overcome obstacles to make this concept work, inclusive of: Spreadsheets not cut it for data sharing and collaboration, so it created performance dashboards for each well. Connectivity was difficult to a few remote wells, so it had to build its own radio and WiFi towers where there... Read More »

The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative offered a good chance to redeploy resources. But agencies that did not seize it now face a tougher investment environment. A group of federal IT executives recently asked me what i presumed in regards to the progress of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) over the last four years. I responded, “lots of opportunities,” as i really believe that’s the case. Let me explain. As any government CIO can inform you, all of it begins with the maths, where 80% of the IT budget is already committed to operations and upkeep per the company Executive Board. The sole strategy to move your company forward is to cut back support costs — and datacenters offer the foremost opportunities. This was certainly my experience as CIO/CTO for the u. s. Postal Service, where I consolidated 19 datacenters all the way down to two. By this as a possibility to standardize, centralize and simplify IT, i used to be in a... Read More »

IBM says it can “rebalance” its workforce in 2014 after a steep slide in hardware sales, but additionally put money into cloud, mobile, analytics, big data, and security to fireside up growth. IBM Predicts Next 5 Life-Changing Tech Innovations (Click image for larger view.) IBM keeps meeting ever-higher earnings-per-share targets, but after reporting another year of declining growth in 2013, the corporate on Tuesday announced plans for “workforce rebalancing” — code words for layoffs — in addition to new investments in emerging areas aimed toward returning the corporate to growth. Its lackluster performance in 2013 was marked by a 5% year-over-year decline in revenue (2% in constant currencies) to $99.8 billion. Operating income was up 2% from the prior year to $18 billion, despite a whopping $1.7 billion decline in profit tied to IBM’s struggling hardware business. Declining sales and currency headwinds notwithstanding, IBM managed to tug out a 7% (non-GAAP) year-over-year increase in earnings per share to $16.28. That financial... Read More »

Tech recruiter shares insights and advice for IT pros with Hadoop skills trying to land a brand new gig. IT Jobs: Best Paying Titles Of 2014 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) When you’re hot, you’re hot, and the open-source Apache Hadoop project have been scorching for ages. That’s excellent news for IT job hunters with serious Hadoop chops and related skills. Demand for those skills has pointed skyward for the past several years, in line with Matt Andrieux, lead technical recruiter at Riviera Partners inside the San Francisco Bay Area. “Our portfolio companies, that are mostly startups, are searhing for a variety of engineers which may help them leverage data in various ways in which might be useful their base line,” Andrieux said in an email interview. “Many companies are basing their entire business off of information collection and analysis, which are useful for any industry.” Andrieux noted that it is not Hadoop itself that’s actually fueling the boom; rather, rising demand for... Read More »

The Weather Company builds a brand new forecasting platform using Basho’s Riak NoSQL database and Amazon Web Services. 5 Big Wishes For large Data Deployments (Click image for larger view and for slideshow.) “Weather is the unique big data application,” says Bryson Koehler, executive VP and CIO on the Weather Company. “When mainframes first happened, one of several first applications was a weather forecasting model.” Flash forward to today and the elements Company ingests some 20 terabytes of knowledge per day to spin out what Keohler bills because the world’s most accurate forecasts. To remain before its competition, the elements Company is inside the strategy of rolling out a brand new platform built on Basho’s Riak NoSQL database and running globally within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Greater than a year inside the making, the recent platform will bring the company’s scale of research to a complete new level. The Weather Company is the parent behind popular brands including the elements Channel, WeatherFX, Weather... Read More »