Platforms and Technology

Research firm IDC forecasts that the worldwide public platform as a service (PaaS) market is expected to grow to more than $14 billion in 2017. As part of this move to the cloud, companies are no longer only looking for SaaS (applications) or IaaS (Infrastructure), but are instead considering application platforms and workloads to gain […]

Azure Site Recovery now provides native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn. SQL Server Availability Groups can be added to a recovery plan along with VMs. All the capabilities of your recovery plan—including sequencing, scripting, and manual actions—can be leveraged to orchestrate the failover of a multitier application using an SQL database configured with AlwaysOn replication. […]

Azure Backup can now back up your on-premises application workloads, including Microsoft SQL Server, Hyper-V VMs, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Exchange. You can back up your applications to a local disk or to Azure, allowing you to eliminate local tape libraries and leverage the unlimited storage capability of Azure. You can also manage all your […]

Mazen just previewed What to Expect Next on BICS and now it is in the process of being released.  The first thing you’ll notice is the new clean and concise consumer-style user experience.  Site navigation and the Home page has changed dramatically as you can see in the screen shot below (the compass next to the user’s name brings up […]

In the coming few days, Oracle will be rolling out an upgrade of their Business Intelligence Cloud Service. There are a couple of main things to expect: First, the UI will look different but function in the same way. It is basically a new skin to BICS, with a slightly different way of navigation. Second, […]

I had the opportunity to attend SharePoint TechFest Houston last week and was duly impressed with the level of continued interest in SharePoint as a platform and the future of the product. Here are a few takeaways from the conference: To kick things off, Synxi CTO Naomi Moneypenny delivered the keynote address focusing on the […]

Azure Mobile Engagement is a SaaS-delivered, data-driven user-engagement platform that enables real-time and fine-grain user segmentation, app user analytics, and context-aware, smart push notifications across all connected devices. You can maximize your app usage, retention, and monetization with this powerful platform. It allows developers, app owners, and line-of-business decision makers to directly contact app users […]

Exciting news for Linux customers! From today’s announcement – The partnership we are announcing today with Red Hat extends our commitment to offer unmatched choice and flexibility in an enterprise-grade cloud experience across the hybrid cloud. With more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 using Microsoft’s cloud, for us to team with the leader […]

I wanted to share a few recent changes to Yammer that you may have started to notice. Some of them are small or effected features that no one used. Others, like External Groups, are rather major updates. In addition, Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a leader in the Social Software space for the seventh consecutive year!! […]

Last week, Oracle released version 12c of OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition). There are several features that are new to 12c, among which is the UI which has now been updated to become more modern compared to the prior 11g interface. The most interesting feature that has been added is the new Data Visualization […]

“Retailers are light years ahead of Wall Street in analyzing their data to find out what their customers want,” said to Peter Giordano, managing director at Oppenheimer & Co. “Instead of analyzing customer data, the industry still relies on salespeople, relationships and actual trades to tell us what clients want.” Big data might be a […]

At Oracle OpenWorld 2015, Mukesh Nakra from Infosys talked about Reinventing HR as part of digital transformation. There are several imperatives driving HR to change: Working with millennial employees and a digital workforce – we can’t support this group with traditional Human Capital Management system Improving employee reach globally with multilingual HR applications Adopting social […]