Tableau and QlikTech move up. See who moves down in Gartner’s ranking of industrial intelligence vendors. 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The more things change, the more they stay the identical. That adage could apply to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms for 2014, released last week, because the same vendors manifest within the prized Leaders quadrant. At first glance, the recent report delivers a really different-looking positioning of vendors than the 2013 quadrant (as shown below). On closer inspection, however, you could find that an analogous 10 vendors are still inside the Leaders quadrant. And the identical two vendors, Birst and Logi Analytics, remain within the Challengers quadrant, albeit in changed positions. The best new news, quadrant-wise, is the emergence of Alteryx and Panorama Software into the Visionaries quadrant. (Tableau Software is one of the vendors offering free downloads of your complete report, but Tableau doesn’t require registration.) In Gartner’s defense, BI and... Read More »

Tier 3 founder Jared Wray, named CenturyLink Cloud CTO, might help modernize CenturyLink’s cloud services with more automation and self-service features. CenturyLink, the telecommunications provider that in the past acquired cloud business enterprise Savvis, has purchased cloud employer Tier 3 and should immediately add its services to the CenturyLink Cloud. No purchase price was disclosed for the privately held company located in Bellevue, Wash. Jared Wray, founder and CTO of Tier 3, becomes CTO of CenturyLink Cloud, and lead what is going to be the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center in Seattle. The goods, roadmap, and vision at that center turns into CenturyLink’s roadmap for the longer term, said Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis cloud unit. “Tier 3’s innovative automation and self-service platform are game-changing for our global enterprise clients,” said Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis unit. The moves represent an accelerated commitment by CenturyLink to compete for cloud computing customers. Savvis was an important player in colocation facilities and managed services going... Read More »

Oracle bows to the growing Open Stack trend, promises to integrate its product line with the open-source project.   8 Great Cloud Storage Services (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Oracle, one of many world’s leading proprietary software companies, and OpenStack, the open-source cloud software project, are headed for holy matrimony. Oracle on Tuesday said it’s now a company sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and may integrate OpenStack into much of its product line. The speed with which private clouds are invading the datacenter could have been a spur for Oracle to totally embrace OpenStack open-source code, although formerly it has tended to choose up only complementary open-source code projects, consisting of MySQL, Java, and Berkeley DB’s Sleepycat, as they reached full maturity. OpenStack is a still a rapidly evolving set of projects, with varying degrees of ease of implementation. Critics claim sometimes a couple of OpenStack project is solving a similar problem. Oracle seemed to be guarding its flanks because it acquired... Read More »

We don’t mean to provide cloud laggards encouragement, but which you can learn from their concerns. Consider the evolution of the cloud disaster. The cloud is excellent until it isn’t Cloud adoption have been accelerating over the last few years, however the sky has not always been blue. The doomsayers had been telling us in regards to the horrors of the cloud from the start, and the fiascos we list here have given them fodder to throw out each time the C word comes up. For instance: The cloud is a good place to store your data, because those providers are devoted to ensuring it gets backed up — until they do not back it up properly, and a hardware failure occurs. The cloud is extremely secure, with significantly better security than any on-premises datacenter — until provider employees reuse their passwords everywhere in the Internet. The cloud has great redundancy and reliability, provided that you propose properly for failure — until the... Read More »