Microsoft made progress in the past few weeks but still has important things to prove. For starters, think Start screen and wearables. Windows 8.1 Update 1: 10 Key Changes (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Microsoft has earned loads of praise this month and for good reason: The corporate faced tough questions within the first half April and answered most of them with aplomb. Some feared Microsoft had missed the danger to profit from iOS’s success, as an instance, but Office apps for the iPad quickly leapt to the end of the App Store charts. At Build, the corporate also introduced new Azure and visible Studio features aimed squarely at iOS developers, including folks that don’t develop for Windows. [Why are such a lot of people still using Windows XP? Read Windows XP Holdouts: 6 Top Excuses.] Microsoft additionally made most Windows licenses free for OEMs, finally showing some spunk after manufacturers spent much of 2013 touting Android and Chrome over Windows. It also... Read More »

MongoDB, the NoSQL darling of developers, aims to enhance scalability, analytics, security, and manageability in significant upgrade. 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Application developers are the most important fans of MongoDB, however the vendor behind the product expects a primary generation, announced Tuesday, to spread the affection among database administrators, security experts, and people trying to extract analytics from the NoSQL database management system (DBMS). The iteration, MongoDB 2.6, delivers significant improvements in scalability, performance, query planning, and safety features in addition a step up in management functionality, in keeping with the seller. Now five years old, MongoDB is an open-source product that has seen 7 million downloads and 1000’s of deployments. It’s widely hailed because the leading NoSQL DBMS available, nonetheless it doesn’t have a name for top scalability, a expect which competitors Cassandra, Couchbase, and Riak shine. [Want more on NoSQL? Read When NoSQL Is smart.] MongoDB 2.6 upgrades user concurrency and connection pooling, so... Read More »

Google’s new Glass At Work program aims to capitalize at the enterprise’s interest in Google Glass, whether consumers are still skeptical. Tech’s Rich And Famous: Who’s Most Charitable? (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) After months of selling Glass as a way accessory and pushing back against misperceptions, without an evident shift in public perception, Google has extended its Explorer Program to businesses to be able to win acceptance for its computerized eyewear within the workplace. Glass at Work, announced Monday, formalizes a pathway toward enterprise use of Glass that many developers had already explored all alone. Google says that it has noticed how a few of its Glass Explorers have used Glass to advance business goals, and that several companies have already got begun working with enterprise software developers to create Glassware relevant to their business processes and customers. It has asked developers engaged on enterprise-oriented Glassware to get in contact. Two organizations which have embraced Glass are the oilfield services company Schlumberger... Read More »

The “connected home” is becoming a reality thanks to improved broadband networks and mobile apps. Here’s a rundown of how our homes are getting smarter. The connected house is no longer a futuristic vision — many of the barriers that blocked the realization of a smart home have eroded. Network bandwidth is widespread, connectivity is becoming more common in many traditional home products, and consumers are craving smart-home experiences. Technology, which had presented the greatest challenge to creating a connected home, isn’t anyw manageable. The broadband and residential networking connections are available in, mobile devices provide a natural fit because the handheld remote control for the house, and the choices for making local connections are manageable for vendors.  [Implementing IoT technologies inside the enterprise is a fancy task. Read How To Prepare For The net Of items] Some of the pieces to the connected home puzzle: Broadband networks provide the back-end connection. Without an always-on broadband connection from the house to the net, consumers cannot maintain awareness... Read More »

Tackling the information explosion requires bold new thinking and the abandonment of tried and tired methodologies. Scale matters. On the subject of datacenter infrastructure, scale separates technology that allows a company to thrive from technology that constantly gets within the way because it crumbles under growth. Nowhere is scale more important than in terms of storage, and specially file storage. Files within the sort of email, documents, and other unstructured information make up 80% of enterprise data, and files grow at a faster rate than all other data types combined. Cloud storage enables file synchronization at scale. The rush to virtualize everything moved every file server into the SAN while forcing file-specific platforms, like NAS, to become dumb-block devices with an emphasis on performance and price in preference to on scale. But files failed to leave. While datacenters embraced virtualization, the file footprint continued to double every two or three years. Traditional storage, data protection, and replication strategies are running out of steam against the... Read More »