Microsoft’s enterprise sales are booming, but Surface remains no match for the iPad. 7 Mistakes Microsoft Made In 2013 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Microsoft handily beat Wall Street estimates Thursday, announcing revenue of $24.52 billion for its second fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31. The very best-grossing quarter in company history, Microsoft’s second quarter, was up from $21.5 billion within the same quarter last year. Net income was $6.6 billion, which translated to 78 cents per share. Analysts had expected net income of $5.8 billion and revenue of $23.7 billion, in step with Thomson Reuters. If Thursday marked the last earnings report for outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, he’ll have exited on a high note. Since announcing his retirement plans in August, Ballmer have been a punching bag within the press, with reports not just critiquing his previous leadership but additionally implying that he and Bill Gates are getting impediments to the quest for Ballmer’s successor. But since bottoming... Read More »

BI giants IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP grew little in 2013, but nimble, visual-data-discovery leaders Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and QlikTech soared. Here’s why. The business intelligence market in 2013 could best be described as tepid. As one vendor CEO put it, “I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse.” The “better” was the mid-1990s, when BI software sales were growing 40% per year. The “worse” was the peak of the recession in 2008, when BI growth limped along at 2%. A study vendor revenues and product releases in 2013 reveals a tale of 2 worlds: the giant BI-platform vendors and the nimbler visual-data-discovery vendors. For essentially the mostsome of the most part, large BI vendors showed flat or low-single-digit revenue growth while companies akin to Tableau (75%), TIBCO Spotfire (30%), and QlikTech (23%) have all shown strong, double-digit growth during the first three quarters of 2013. Their secret? Agility. In the now-normal frenetic pace of economic, users can now not watch for that completely architected, IT-sanctioned reports... Read More »

Fast-growing cloud startup plans to rent more engineers and build new data centers. DigitalOcean, the cloud organisation with facilities in Ny, Amsterdam, Singapore, and San Francisco, has received a hefty $37.2 million in its first round of funding as a way to build out its service. The round was led by Adreesen Horowitz of Menlo Park, Calif., and could be used to rent engineers to construct out infrastructure and add cloud service features. DigitalOcean is a service primarily oriented toward developers, providing simple, basic virtual servers equipped with solid state storage. Its prices are under Amazon Web Services. On the most simple level, developers may use a virtual server for 7 cents an hour or 2.1 cents for 3 hours, or a for flat fee of $5 a month. In mid-2013, DigitalOcean was cited by Netcraft because the cloud service adding web-facing servers at one of the vital fastest rates on the earth. At first of 2013, it ranked 568th among cloud services. On the... Read More »

Independent software vendors can now receive an identical support as Google resellers. At its second annual Global Partner Summit on Thursday, Google launched a program to support its Google Apps technology partners and to assist them create software that augments Google’s cloud-based applications. The corporate also expanded and reorganized its Cloud Platform Partner Program into three tiers to offer differentiated partnership levels and to present a path for any company to take part. Google first set its eyes at the enterprise market in 2002 with the discharge of its Search Appliance and got fascinated about building a Google Apps partner ecosystem in 2005, adding an Apps reseller program in 2009 and a business-oriented Apps Marketplace in 2010. In parallel, Google launched App Engine in 2008 and the cloud-based application hosting service has since evolved into the Google Cloud Platform, which competes for corporate computing business with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, among other cloud-oriented offerings. In 2005, Google said it had 2,000 enterprise customers.... Read More »

Cloud-based Hadoop solution helps pharmaceutical company Astellas compress pieces of its market research from weeks to hours. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (click image for larger view) In the high-stakes game of promoting a brand new drug, understanding what’s working and what is not could make the variation between success and costly failure. For top-20 pharmaceutical company Astellas, a brand new product launch last year presented the promoting analytics team with an information-velocity problem: Data from the sphere was arriving much faster than before. “We started getting weekly patient data, in place of monthly,” Chad Dau, associate director of promoting analytics at Astellas told InformationWeek by phone. The accelerated pace meant the team couldn’t properly process and report at the data before the following batch arrived. Adding complexity, Astellas and other drug companies increasingly are incorporating new data sets into their analyses, including unstructured text, audio, and video. [ Read how automation has drawn in cloud enthusiasts: Private Cloud Adoptions On A Roll. ] Dau turned... Read More »