Daily Tech Briefing: May 12, 2014

Microsoft has extended its cloud-based business intelligence platform for Office 365—Power BI—with a new update designed to bring forecasting capabilities to the software. Power BI is Microsoft’s self-service BI offering, which allows users to analyze data using Excel.

The company announced that the new Power BI forecasting tools for the Power View component will enable users to predict their data series forward in interactive charts and reports. Users will be able to explore the forecasted results while adjusting for seasonality and outliers, viewing result ranges at different confidence levels and using “hindcasts” to view how the model would have predicted recent results.

There have been major executive shakeups at enterprise software giant SAP recently, with both the company’s CTO and its cloud unit head stepping down. These changes have led some industry observers to question whether SAP’s business plans remain on a sound footing, especially when it comes to cloud technology.

Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research, explained that when multiple executives leave a company, it could suggest turmoil behind the scenes. However, despite these changes, SAP says its cloud business is growing steadily and its overall cloud strategy remains on course.

While it’s been a month since the Heartbleed vulnerability was exposed, it still remains a threat to hundreds of thousands of systems. Security researcher Robert Graham wrote in a blog post that he scanned the Internet and discovered that many systems are still vulnerable to the threat posed by Heartbleed.

Furthermore, a study conducted by Netcraft found that 7 percent of the reissued SSL certificates were done with the same private key, meaning that these websites are still facing exactly the same risks as those that have not yet replaced their SSL certificates.

Finally, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., has overturned a a 2012 circuit court decision and has ruled that Oracle is entitled to copyright protection over application programming interfaces in the Java programming language, which are important components in the open-source Android operating system. Now, Oracle is free to pursue its copyright suit against Google over Android’s use of Java.