Jim Kaskade

Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs upfront, quick time-to-market. With private and public cloud solutions, both big and small companies benefit. So what about big data platforms? Is there an equivalent opportunity, or is Big Data only suited for Big Companies with Big Problems? I think Big Data applies to all, and here’s why. OLTP & DSS Era When I first started working on Teradata’s next-generation switch fabric, the BYNET, back in the early 90s, Teradata was around $250M in revenue (now over $2B). The concept of decision support systems (DSS) evolved into data warehousing and grew to become the largest pool ... (more)

Most Powerful Voices in Security

The security community has a growing number of influential and important people, especially as the industry rises to meet the need to address more advanced security threats, such as targeted attacks. But how does a company in the security industry truly identify the influential people? And then once identified, how does one use influential voices to help promote their brand? In this study, we answer the first question - how to identify the most powerful voices in your industry, focusing on the security space, and as part of this we provide you a list of people to follow for the b... (more)

What’s the Biggest Security Threat?

Based on a survey sent to over 200 CISOs (see Justin Somaini, Yahoo! CISO, survey here), malware is the most significant security threat, followed by compliance failure, then employee theft, external state espionage, external ecrime, external state sponsored sabotage, and external competitor espionage. Surprised? I was. I predicted that compliance would be #1. I think [...] ... (more)

Cloud Orchestration & Management

Cloud orchestration and management has roots which date back to ‘automation’ framework days of the ASP. The two companies which really defined the segment were Breakaway Solutions (aka BladeLogic) and Loudcloud (aka Opsware). During the dot-com boom, Breakaway employed Dev Ittycheria and Vijay Manwani, and Loudcloud was the led by Marc Andreessen. These two groups identified the bottleneck that [...] ... (more)

Graphs and Big Data = Big Graph?

I’ve been very intrigued by graphs and their potentially broad application leveraging Big Data and Big Analytics. I don’t mean the idea of mining your twitter feeds or Facebook friends. Don’t get me wrong. The idea of targeting your brand’s influencers in the “social graph” with a social media marketing campaign is great. Lots of [...] ... (more)