Starting Small with Big Data

Starting Small with Big Data

I recently read an excellent IBM paper on best practices for achieving line-of-business (LOB) performance increases through enterprise data analytics. This is an impressive and convincing piece on how top-down planning at the enterprise level can enable positive...

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Big Data and Gardening

Big Data and Gardening

You can be a botanist, a horticulturist or a gardener—it depends on how knowledgeable you want to be about what you are growing. But what’s that got to do with Big Data? Well, I was recently having a conversation with Matt Ritter from Athena Health about Big Data,...

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A Mainframe Migration Disaster Story

A Mainframe Migration Disaster Story

A few years ago, I was speaking at a conference on the west coast—attending were mostly IT executives from startup companies, and it was a lively group. Also, some IT folks were in attendance from some more established companies. Afterwards I sat beside one such chap...

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Bimodal IT – is it really the right way to go?

Bimodal IT – is it really the right way to go?

I’ve been hearing a lot about Bimodal IT—Gartner was pumping it up recently at their Gartner Symposium, while Jason Bloomberg at Forbes.com didn’t like it and neither does Compuware’s Chis O’Malley. I don’t like it either. Bimodal IT is one of those things that I...

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6 Ways Mainframe In-memory Technology Can Save You

6 Ways Mainframe In-memory Technology Can Save You

When people hear talk about in-memory technology, they immediately assume the discussion revolves around Big Data and analytics being run on distributed systems, and that the database part of the discussion focuses on things like SAP HANA, TIBCO, VoltDB, or even IBM...

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The New Era of Mainframe and Mobility

The New Era of Mainframe and Mobility

How proven technology is the only technology for the global mobile paradigm It’s no secret—the disparaging things we hear behind closed doors and in darkened IT lunch rooms, the rumors that the mainframe is dead or, at the very least, going the way of the Dodo....

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Don’t get fooled by the Mainframe FUD

Don’t get fooled by the Mainframe FUD

I've been seeing FUD (Fear! Uncertainty! Doubt!) articles like this one for years now and while it's pretty easy to see through them, this time I decided that I just have to say something. The gist of the article, as the title suggests, is that legacy systems are old...

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