President Mark Hurd explains Oracle’s strategy on cloud, marketing, innovation, and people pesky startup rivals. Mark Hurd showed up 10 minutes early for our scheduled 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. interview, which we conducted earlier this month in a shut-down bar off the lobby of Manhattan’s Palace Hotel. Hurd, one in every of Oracle’s two co-presidents, was on the town partly to handle the invitation-only Chief Marketing Officer Leadership Forum later that morning. i used to be pleased to get 40 minutes to speak with Hurd about Oracle, in addition to industry and customer trends, as something of a primer for the on-stage keynote Q&A the 2 folks should be doing on the InformationWeek Conference in Las Vegas on April 1. The previous time I had sat down with Hurd was also in Long island, in October 2011. It was a year after CEO Larry Ellison had brought within the no-nonsense former HP CEO to guide Oracle’s sales and marketing efforts while the opposite co-president,... Read More »

IBM’s new Kenexa tool aims to assist HR and business professionals with recruitment, training, and function assessment. CES 2014: 8 Technologies To Watch (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) IBM has announced a SaaS-based product designed to assist human resources professionals and business managers use big data to enhance talent recruitment, employee training, and function assessment. The IBM Kenexa Talent Suite incorporates new and previously developed applications from IBM and Kenexa, which IBM acquired in 2012 for $1.3 billion. Using big data analytics, the suite evaluates employee information reminiscent of work experience, social engagement, skill development, and individual character traits to fine-tune the recruitment process and helps employers understand their workforce, the corporate said. This can foster such things as better targeted candidate searches through social recruiting sites resembling LinkedIn. “Organizations everywhere today are on a mission to spot and hire top talent,” IBM said in an announcement. “By hiring exactly the right employees after which arming them with... Read More »

Mayor de Blasio needs greater than public support to advance his plans for jobs, education, and public safety. He must harness big data. Internet Of factors: 8 Cost-Cutting Ideas For Government (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inaugural State of the town remarks set an ambitious, liberal agenda. Covering topics including income inequality, education, and environmental sustainability, de Blasio could have his work cut out for him as he challenges a number of the city’s most deeply rooted problems. One way his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, worked to handle city challenges was with municipal data analytics programs and an overarching, data-driven mindset. Building on Bloomberg’s successes with data policies and applying lessons from other cities, de Blasio could make great strides toward improving the standard of life for brand new York City’s 8.3 million residents. Jobs and economic developmentMayor de Blasio has proposed a whole lot of measures around job training, including making a system to glue jobseekers... Read More »

Amazon Web Services follows Rackspace, Colt, and Digital Ocean in ramping up high I/O servers with solid state disks. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (click image for larger view) Amazon Web Services introduced I2, its second generation of high I/O instance types, Monday, after the primary generation, H1, proved too bulky for some users seeking a server optimized for random I/Os. Not every data-capture or demand stored data amounts to a sequential read or write, something that spinning disks are good at. In reality, many are for random reads or writes, something that solid state disks (SSDs) are good at. Spinning hard drives, then again, can prove slow at random data retrieval because the head moves mechanically to the correct area of the spinning plate. The four new I2 instances are equipped with SSDs to eliminate that latency. Amazon is somewhat late in coming to the cast state party. In Europe, Colt implemented extensive SSD-based services earlier, as did Rackspace and startup DigitalOcean within the US.... Read More »

The disruptive power of Microsoft’s Open Compute Group move has spurred debate. Let’s talk image versus cold hard revenues. Microsoft In 2013: 7 Lessons Learned (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Microsoft surprised the tech industry Tuesday when it joined the open-source hardware movement, announcing on the Open Compute Summit in San Jose that it is going to offer the Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications utilized in Microsoft datacenters in addition to code for server management software. Microsoft’s participation speaks to the changing trajectory of the datacenter. In a report released last week called “Predictions for 2014: Private Cloud Management and Infrastructure,” the research firm Forrester forecast the proliferation of OCP-compliant and other low-cost, open-source commodity servers. At least one expert, however, isn’t convinced Microsoft’s participation is a transparent game-changer. “It’s interesting,” said Gartner VP Jeffrey Hewitt in a phone interview. “However probably won’t be a tremendous thing.” [For more on Microsoft’s move to open source, see Microsoft... Read More »