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Tell me, professor, what is big data?
Big Data may be misunderstood and overhyped - but the promise of data growth enabling a goldmine of insight is compelling. Professor Mark Whitehorn, the eminent data scientist, author and occasional Register columnist, explains what big data is and why it is important.
Sometimes life is generous and hands you an unexpected gift …
Oracle automates master data management workflow
Oracle has released a new product aimed at automating some master data management (MDM) chores.
MDM is often spoken of when software companies discuss “a single version of the truth”, shorthand term for the tricky problem that arises when a company deals with related-but-differentiated entities.
A single version of the truth is …
Give up your privacy so Big Data can FIX GOVERNMENT
Edward Snowden's revelations about government snooping mean it is very hard to make a case for governments collecting and using information about their citizens.
But in New Zealand, giving one agency the right to use more information has quickly paid off, saving millions in the short term, billions in the future and reducing the …
Microsoft loosens strings on Office 365, drops kimono on upgrade options
Microsoft has unveiled the first in a series of planned updates to its Office 365 licensing plans for potentially easier upgrades.
The Office 365 blog has outlined the options, announced at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in July as “transition SKUs”, for users to upgrade.
The Switch plans come with certain …
IBM CIO's Great Refresh: No, Sales Guy, you can't JUST use DropBox
CIO interview She might be CIO of IBM, but Jeanette Horan is just like you: replacing Windows XP with Windows 7, ripping out Internet Explorer 6 and floating a growing amount of software on the cloud.
She also has to contend with staffers begging her for the ability to share information using third-party sync 'n' share apps like DropBox. …
SAP's cloud sets on-premises bods free from licence fees... Oh, hang on
SAP has eased the cost burden for customers switching to cloud versions of its software but be prepared to barter for a good deal - and don't expect to reduce your payments to Walldorf.
In a carefully worded announcement, SAP last week said it is now allowing customers to "re-allocate elements" of its software installed on …
'Fat Wallet Bob' leaves Apple tech chief spot for Special Projects Bureau
An Apple executive whose pay packet was the second largest in the US has waved goodbye to his position as senior vice president of technologies at Cupertino.
The firm announced that Bob Mansfield - formerly its veep of hardware engineering - has stepped down from his current position, but will continue to work under Tim Cook, …
Congrats architects, PR bods, toolmakers - you're the new digital tycoons!
There are at least 40 per cent more companies that make up the UK's "digital economy" than any Government estimates, and those companies tend to be considerably more successful than non-digital companies, researchers have found.
The study [43-page, 6.2MB PDF], commissioned by Google and produced by the National Institute for …
IBM, Accenture play blame game over $1bn project blowout
IBM and Accenture are sniping at one another in public over just who should take the blame - and the fall - for the $AUD1bn blowout of a project to provide the Australian State of Queensland's Department of Health with a new payroll system.
The project kicked off in 2007 with a budget of just over $6m. It's now expected to cost …
Bungled Hitachi SAN upgrade halts Oregon benefit payments
A bungled Hitachi storage area networking (SAN) upgrade has delayed the payout of over $18 million in benefits in Oregon.
The SAN failure began Monday evening in the state capital of Salem, and was fixed by Tuesday morning, with various state agencies taking the day to work through a backlog of jobs that had built up.
" …
CIOs bombarded with hybrid cloud surveys
Two surveys published in recent days that major on CIOs and their attitude to hybrid cloud show the scramble among IT vendors to win enterprise hearts and minds.
A survey of 52 US CIOs conducted for SAP reveals strong support for the notion that hybrid cloud – combining cloud and on-premise applications – reduce complexity and …
Swollen cloud could burst at any time, splatter us with FAIL – anxious tech biz
As a technology consultant, I regularly speak - both formally and informally - with sellers and buyers of cloud services, and I don't know if I can ever remember a time when the conversations have been further apart.
While may be a temporary disconnect, it may point to something long term and more fundamental. Everyone is using …
The irresistible rise of the corporate app
The rise of the corporate app is due to both fashion and user demand.
Once upon a time there were programs. Today they are called apps. The big difference is that apps are fashionable, and fashion drives a lot of what even sane IT types do. So much so that even the Windows Phone has settings in the control panel for “company …
UK.gov to drive stake through heart of big IT outsourcing deals
A wave of huge government IT outsourcing contracts finishing this year won’t be renewed as No.10 snatches back control of Whitehall technology from tech firms.
Civil servants will now be expected to take greater responsibility for their departments’ systems and policy, and only engage with suppliers through G-Cloud.
Ahead of …
UK.gov to be fully BIM-enabled 'by 2016'
The eighth BCS Configuration Management conference was billed as the premier UK event on Change, Release and Configuration Management for ITIL and Service Management.
The BCS had lined up a range of speakers from a diverse spread of industries and expertise and the day didn’t disappoint.
The conference kicked off in London last …
'The Apprentice' is a load of old codswallop, says biz prof
BBC "reality" TV show The Apprentice is totally rubbish and offers no lessons of any value on how to succeed in business - indeed quite the opposite - according to a professor.
“The Apprentice presents the idea that you have to be sociopathic in your relations with others in order to succeed in business," fumes Professor Martin …
The five constants of IT asset management
Kylie Fowler got controversial when she spoke last month to an audience of asset management and configuration management professionals at the BCS CMSG Conference in London about the five constants she always encounters in her 10-plus years of working as an IT asset management consultant.
While these constants may always hold …
HP Enterprise scores major win with $3.5bn Navy network contract
Meg Whitman will crack one of her infrequent smiles on Friday with the news that HP Enterprise is facing a potential $3,454,735,513 payday after winning the contract to manage US Navy's networks for the next five years.
HP helping Navy admins control networks In the Navy, you can hack the seven seas...
In the world of …
Intel CTO Rattner steps down to attend to 'pressing family matter'
One of the most familiar faces of chip giant Intel is CTO Justin Rattner, and he has just announced his departure from the company.
Rattner joined Chipzilla in 1973, and six years later he was the company's first principal engineer. He was named its fourth Intel Fellow in 1988 thanks in large part to his work in parallel …
Breaking with your back-up supplier is a sticky business
Backup is like software superglue with three sticking points: the backup software installation; its operation; and the longevity of the stored backup data vault, which can be needed for years after the last piece of data has been written to it.
Let's take an imaginary product, BackNetVaultExec Pro. It is a typical enterprise …
Salesforce and Oracle forge partnership to smash rivals
Analysis The notoriously shy and unassuming CEOs of Oracle and Salesforce have announced a major partnership after spending years throwing clods of muck at one another – leading many to ask what is going on in the IT industry to cause this change.
News of the broad alliance between Salesforce and Oracle was announced on Tuesday, and will …
Finance CIOs sweat as regulators prepare to probe aging mainframes
Could the watchful eyes of regulators soon come to rest on the old and often creaking IT systems that run the back offices of the UK’s leading banks?
Among CIOs in the sector, there’s a palpable concern that they will. It’s no secret, after all, that most retail banks rely on decades-old technology for their core banking systems …
Brits' HSBC bank cards, net access goes TITSUP
HSBC in the UK is suffering an unexplained outage across a number of systems today.
Brit customers have had their cards declined and experienced problems using internet banking and the fast balance app.
A spokesperson for the bank told The Reg: "We're aware that some customers are experiencing problems and we're looking into it …
RBS Mainframe Meltdown: A year on, the fallout is still coming
A year ago, RBS experienced its Chernobyl moment – an incident when a case of simple human error by those running critical systems resulted in a crisis.
IT staff badly botched routine maintenance of the IBM mainframe handling millions of customers' accounts – a system processing 20 million transactions a day. The mistake was …
India's outsourcers fume over new US immigration bill
Indian outsourcing body NASSCOM has labelled a new immigration bill being considered by the US as “discriminatory”.
The Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act could bring in sweeping reforms including limiting the number of H-1B visas – the class of visa granted to temporary foreign workers – …
Gartner magicians conjure technological TUBE MAP
Gartner's Magic Qudrants are beloved by vendors (when they appear in its best bits) but often draw disapproving doubts from Reg readers, who doubt their independence
What, then, to make of the analyst outfit's latest visualisation, the “Digital Marketing Transit Map” with its promise to help viewers “Find your digital direction— …
Google staffing boss: Our old hiring procedures were 'worthless'
Want to land a job at Google? Just doing well at school and being good at solving puzzles and brainteasers isn't going to cut it anymore, according to Laszlo Bock, the Chocolate Factory's vice president of "people operations."
Over the years, prospective Google hires have recounted tales of the company's elaborate interview …
O2 averts strike action over mass Capita outsourcing deal
The Communication Workers' Union has called off its strike ballot, scheduled to close today, following a last-minute deal with O2 and outsourcing giant Capita, the details of which haven't been released.
The union called the ballot last week, following O2's announcement that call centre staff would be transferred to outsourcing …
What did the Lehman Brothers implosion look like to a techie?
I was at Lehman Brothers (AKA "Lehman's", or "The Brothers", spoken in a slightly menacing US-Italian accent) from January 1996 to June 2008, bar a three year gap in the middle for dotcom japes. I was an IT contractor/consultant with several groups in the Fixed Income division, including Credit, which dealt with the infamous …
IT staff clamouring to pay for their own BYOD kit, says survey
Over two thirds of US mobile workers now pay for their own kit, with a further third saying that choice affects their choice of employer – making BYOD more important than ever.
The numbers come from iPass, global provider of connectivity to those mobile workers, but reflects a trend where bringing your own device (BYOD) into the …
Why SoftLayer can't lift IBM into the clouds
Comment There are only three major cloud companies, and try as it might, IBM isn't going to change that in the near-term with its acquisition of SoftLayer.
This is because the three major public clouds – Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, and Google Compute Engine – are each supported by a consumer internet giant.
These internet …
Microsoft CIO bails out to pursue 'personal projects'
Microsoft's Chief Information Officer, Tony Scott, has left the company.
Microserfs were reportedly told he'd moved on last week, but news reached the outside world when Scott's LinkedIn profile primary reported he had become the “former CIO” at Microsoft.
Microsoft has since confirmed Scott's exit, telling GeekWire “Tony Scott …
Windows Phone piques CIO interest says analyst
Windows Phones may not be setting sales charts afire, but CIOs like the look of 'em, according to new research from analyst outfit Frost & Sullivan.
The Australia 2013 Enterprise Mobility Report, discussed today at CeBit Australia by the firm's head of ICT research Audrey William, asked a small sample of CIOs (227 to be precise …
Big Data is bovine excrement says Obama's Big Data man
Big Data is “bullshit”, says Harper Reed, Chief Technology Officer at Obama for America 2012.
Speaking at the CeBIT conference in Sydney, Australia, today, Reed said he encountered the the term “Big Data” in 2007 when it referred to a storage problem.
“We used it in 2007 because it was hard to store data,” he said. “People who …
BBC suspends CTO after £100m is WASTED on doomed IT system
The BBC has suspended its chief technology officer on full pay - after it spunked almost £100m on a "tapeless" digital content management system that didn't deliver.
The £98.4m figure attributed to the failed Digital Media Initiative (DMI) may be a conservative estimate: the BBC Trust has commissioned an external technical …
New Intel CEO Krzanich takes reins of core product groups
Newly minted Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has hit the ground running, having already begun a sweeping reorganization that reshuffles Chipzilla's leadership and sees the launch of a new mobile devices division.
Reuters was first to report the shakeup on Tuesday, based on details of a leaked companywide email that an Intel spokesman …
UTS Business School bakes SAP into courses
The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is poised to offer courses in SAP.
The courses will be offered as either standalone subjects or as part of a Master of Business in Accounting. Bean-counting is the focus on the new courses, two of which are “foundation” level affairs consisting of a “Certificate 1 in Accounting with SAP …
'Untidy' Shoreditch just CONFUSES American techies - Olympic hub team
A leading American tech incubator is considering opening a British outpost on the site of the Stratford Olympics, The Register can reveal.
Cambridge Innovations Center, once home to part of the Google team that designed Android, is in top-secret preliminary discussions with iCity, the company building a digital hub in a formerly …
Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel
Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser has claimed the world is entering a new "sixth wave" of computing, driven by the arrival of omnipresent computers and machine-learning.
Speaking at a Software East event this week, the celebrated computer whiz said we are entering an era where computers are everywhere and often undetectable - …
Larry Page acknowledges creeping vocal paralysis
It has often been noted that Google's CEO Larry Page comes across as somewhat muted when speaking, which he took a break from entirely last year with an unexplained throat issue. Now he has revealed what the problem is.
His vocal issues began 14 years ago after a heavy cold left him very hoarse. His condition was diagnosed as …
On inertia, garages and the future of ERP
Secret CIO Success has a by-product. The more success we experience as a result of doing something, the more of it we do. Even once the success rate slows, we keep doing the same thing in the hope the change is a blip and that if we keep doing what worked before good things will happen any minute now if we persevere.
This happens with …
Tech firm CEOs more restrained than most at limiting personal pay
If you want to see the greatest disparity between the average worker and the CEO's pay packet, America is the place to be. But while the heads of many blue-chip US firms cash in more than most, the country's technology bosses are more abstemious.
Since 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required publicly-traded …
