Let’s deconstruct the “flash will die” theory. I’ve read about a articles recently predicting a sudden and abrupt end to the flash market. The rationale given was that as flash NAND gets cheaper, it also becomes less reliable. Here is due to the decreasing flash lithography and the increasing write density (choice of bits per cell). Each of those lowers the life expectancy of the technology. The concept is that, as this continues to happen, flash turns into unsustainable and the industry will move directly to something else. While I agree that flash will someday get replaced by another technology, i don’t believe that’s going to happen anytime soon. Except for NVDIMM, most competing memory technology is five to 6 years faraway from being appropriate for the enterprise, and NVDIMM should be used only in small quantities as a result of cost. There’s various technology that supports the flash NAND market. This includes flash controller technology that controls how and where flash is written. The... Read More »

Salesforce.com spent $2.5 billion to purchase ExactTarget to reinforce its analytics capabilities, so don’t expect it to do another pricey acquisition. Is Salesforce.com doing enough to satisfy the analytics needs of its customers? It is a question that came up not once but twice in Q&A sessions with company executives finally month’s Dreamforce conference. The response offered by CEO Marc Benioff and executive VP of goods Kendall Collins was that Salesforce is doing plenty to fulfill the demand. “We’re an enormous analytics provider through millions of millions of dashboards which are being generated by all of our customers,” said Benioff. “Reports are going out and we’re providing an important amount of decision support.” Salesforce is totally pursuing deeper analytics where it’s sales, service, and marketing applications are concerned. Benioff pointed to deep campaign analytics offered by ExactTarget, the promoting automation and campaign management firm Salesforce acquired for a whopping $2.5 billion in June. After which there are the platform-level capabilities, which include APIs utilized by... Read More »

Vendors from Aryaka and Pertino to Cisco and incumbent carriers wish to shake up your wide area world. Here’s why you’ll want to allow them to. The cloud’s capacity to upend long-standing IT practices — and vendor business models — knows no bounds. Having changed how it organizations deliver applications and infrastructure, cloud services at the moment are changing the way in which they design, deploy, and manage wide area networks. That change is coming none too soon for respondents to the InformationWeek 2014 Next-Generation WAN Survey. Though 68% of respondents see demand for WAN bandwidth increasing (versus 34% who said so in our 2012 survey), just 15% are bringing new services or more capacity online now. Given the lead time to provision WAN links, we wonder just why they’re waiting. Enter a brand new wave of vendors, from newcomers reminiscent of Aryaka, Glue Networks, and Pertino to titans similar to Cisco, all trying to the cloud to seriously change your WAN. Through the use... Read More »

UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh will discuss a model for tech product development, the role of tech in healthcare reform, and more during an InformationWeek.com radio chat on Tuesday. Innovation in healthcare technology takes a load more than really helpful. Consider telemedicine. Not just must a patient and doctor agree that a video session is fine to switch an in-person visit, but so must the insurance company that pays for the session, the federal government bodies that regulates it, and the hospital that supports it. The complexity involved is a huge reason healthcare provider the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center thinks it could help create breakthrough IT products. And it’s why UPMC has install a greater than 120-person Technology Development Center to refine technology that UPMC can use in-house and market to other healthcare providers and payers. The goal is to make UPMC in-house IT a profit source. “Almost everything I’m doing I’m thinking, ‘Can I make it right into a commercial product?'” says UPMC CIO... Read More »

Cryptographic currency’s massive rise in value ends up in a corresponding increase in online heists by criminals seeking easy paydays. 10 IT Job Titles We Miss (Click image for larger view.) Say you’ve created a cryptographic currency called bitcoin that promises users relative anonymity and untraceable transactions. What may be able to get it wrong? The reply, obviously, is that these virtues also attract hackers, malware developers, and arranged crime rings who wouldn’t consider carefully about committing virtual bank robberies. Earlier this month, as an example, Bitcoin Internet Payment System (BIPS), a Denmark-based Bitcoin payment processor, suffered a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Unfortunately for users of the company’s free online wallets for storing bitcoins, the DDoS attack was merely a smokescreen for a digital heist that quickly drained numerous wallets, netting the attackers a reported 1,295 bitcoins — worth nearly $1 million — and leaving wallet users with little chance that they’d ever see their money again. “On November 15th BIPS was the objective of a... Read More »