Thursday, May 13, 2010

SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8 billion

This acquisition has the potential to upend the software industry in a significant way. Sybase doesn't have the greatest database market share but its mobility software will allow SAP to connect its enterprise software (including analytics) to billions of devices. Few companies have successfully made key transitions in their business. SAP is in the middle of one them, it looks like they are taking it very seriously.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Facebook has the world's largest Hadoop cluster

I like it when different themes are beginning to converge. Earlier this year, I wrote the importance of mining enterprise data. But how do you organize, index, and search a large amount of mostly unstructured data (ie emails, blogs, documents, web pages, logs, videos)? Here comes Hadoop. This is a very good video that explains Hadoop as a new data platform.



Another of my key themes is social networking and Facebook just released data about their Hadoop storage cluster. 21 PB of data, that's 1 million gigabytes and you can bet it will double next year or so. That's a lot of data to mine to get value for advertisers.