Chris Preimesberger

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is a multifaceted personality who been described in many ways—among them are cavalier, generous, pretentious, outspoken and flamboyant. But one descriptive that’s never been attached to him is not being smart. A basic law of business declares: “When the markets change, change is necessary by all players in that market.” […]

In times of distress, companies facing trouble often lock arms in a mutual effort to help themselves recover from body blows received in the marketplace. Microsoft has been a party to this a few times in the past, most famously with Apple in 1996 and again with Nokia in 2011. Seventeen years ago, struggling pre-iPhone […]

Facebook on June 20 revealed that it has built out its already popular Instagram mobile photo-sharing application by adding the option of creating video clips ranging from three to 15 seconds long. These can be strung together to make longer videos, should the user choose to do so. Instagrammers—and there are about 130 million of […]

Oracle, which is seeing some of its business level off—and in some cases erode—in the face of less-expensive cloud-based competition, on June 20 reported a tidy profit to go with flat overall income for the financial quarter that ended May 31. Its stock price took a fall after the session close, slipping an alarming 8 […]

Getting the Most From Your Big Data Stores: 10 Best Practices by Chris Preimesberger Tap Your Network Data These are gold mines of information of which many companies don’t take advantage. Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers’ Wants or Needs Embrace your customers for what they do, rather than what you think they’re doing. Stay […]

In the wake of recent natural disasters such as the East Coast’s Hurricane Sandy, disaster recovery has become a particularly hot topic among IT administrators and managers. DR has always been crucial in defending against natural disasters, human error and equipment failure—the latter two of which are far more prevalent. Whatever the cause, after a […]

It’s a big, diverse IT world out there. In any given data center, you can walk down the aisles and see racks of servers or storage from literally dozens of different companies, all doing their jobs—but not necessarily always in exact harmony. The coordination of proprietary, open-source and open-standards software that can clash is often […]

Internet search and Web services pioneer Yahoo officially became a lot more relevant to Millennials and younger generations June 20 when it closed its $1.1 billion deal to acquire Tumblr. In Marissa Mayer’s first major move as CEO, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo had announced on May 20 the purchase of the New York-based blogging platform that […]

Next-Gen Object Storage: 10 Key Data Points From Industry Summit by Chris Preimesberger Defining Object Storage Object-oriented storage, which has been around for more than two decades, differs from unstructured file storage in that the objects filed are not housed in volumes or attached to a directory. Objects are simply assigned an ID number or […]

As data loads continue to pour into IT systems from humans and machines with no slowdown in sight, the control of security, management and discoverability of all that business-related content becomes an increasingly important mandate. With all of this in mind, unstructured data management specialist Recommind on June 19 came out with its new Information […]

Enterprises in locations that don’t usually register high in storage IT purchasing are making their moves up the industry charts. New research from IDC released June 17 projects that the geographical region of Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMA) will surpass Japan in total enterprise storage user spending in 2014. By 2015, IDC said, […]

Hewlett-Packard made yet another high-level administration change June 18 when it repurposed the head of its struggling personal computing and printing divisions, Todd Bradley, and assigned him to handle sales strategies in China. In his place, HP named a former key executive of Lenovo and Acer, Dion Weisler, currently senior vice president for HP in […]