David Needle

Business intelligence tools have long been important to helping companies spot buying patterns, product return rates and other information useful in product development and support. But the information is by definition old because the analysis often happens days or weeks after the purchase information has been collected. In this age of social media, the popularity […]

Building on last year’s release of its easy-to-use, visual developer platform Lightning, Salesforce has announced the availability of Salesforce Lightning Components and AppExchange for Components. The idea behind Lightning is to simplify the development of enterprise mobile apps via point-and-click and drop down menus and templates. Components, which include handy functions such as search, mapping, […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Software developers and enterprises of all kinds want to reach the growing number of mobile users who have ditched the desktop in favor of smartphones and tablets. But while users may love their mobile devices, they don’t love apps that are overly intrusive and stray from simple design concepts.That was the message conveyed by […]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The allure of cloud systems, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is unmistakable. Companies can stop investing in expensive, hard-to-maintain data centers and move to the cloud where they only pay for the resources (compute power and storage) they need, and the vendor maintains the infrastructure. The value proposition is […]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—With the growth of big data comes the challenge of analyzing and accessing the right information from among the huge stores of data today’s systems can collect. Companies typically employ data scientists to help in the effort, but a panelist here at the AlwaysOn Silicon Valley Innovation Summit said future growth is tied […]

Salesforce.com released a new generation of the Marketing Cloud, which the company said is designed to address the needs of companies looking to expand beyond traditional online media buys to social and mobile media with a broad set of online services. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives marketers the ability to automate the process of launching […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—With any new technology there are likely concerns about whether it’s worth the investment in time, expense and deviation from the tools and infrastructure any organization is already familiar with. But a panel of enterprise IT executives speaking at the Hadoop Summit here said they have no regrets about diving in with Hadoop […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Business, science and academic researchers have access to an unprecedented array of data to mine and discover significant trends, from social network chatter to consumer buying patterns, credit card transactions and even sports statistics. But speakers at the Hadoop Summit here June 10 noted that many organizations aren’t aware of the novel techniques […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.– Over the next few years, Hadoop will be adopted by virtually all enterprises and become just as much a part of the core IT infrastructure as database management systems, according to Mike Gualtieri, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s a data operating system and a fundamental data platform that in the next […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Patrick Lightbody, a product manager with software performance management company New Relic, ditched his favorite food truck because of his new Apple Watch. More than just an amusing story though, it served to highlight the changes coming in mobility and user interfaces as well as the ever-growing appeal of real-time response. Lightbody loved […]