Author: Serkadis

Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the company’s recent earnings call that Apple is hard at work on new hardware and software that will begin rolling out “this fall and throughout 2014.” Numerous reports over the past few months likely paint a good broad picture of what we can expect — an iPhone 5S, a redesigned iPad, a Retina iPad mini, maybe a smartwatch and possibly even a TV — but as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

Continue reading…

As previously reported, Google is showing a homepage doodle honoring the 96th birthday of jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald in parts of the world where it’s currently April 25th. The doodle has now made it to our side of the world here in the U.S.

Fitzgerald was born on this day in 1917, and passed away on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79. She is known as the “Queen of Jazz” as well as the “First Lady of Song”.

As usual, Google has shown a variety of different doodles throughout the world this week. On Sunday, the UK was treated to this one honoring the 100th birthday of Sir Norman Parkinson:

On Monday, the world received the Earth Day doodle:

South Korea got this Dooly the Little Dinosaur doodle on Monday:

The UK got another doodle on Tuesday for St. George’s Day:

Turkey and Cyprus also got this National Sovereignty and Children’s Day doodle on Tuesday:

On Wednesday, Mexico got this Gabriel Figueroa doodle:

After some experimenting and monitoring user behavior, Bing has made some changes to the way its shows search results.

Bing R&D Corporate Vice President Dr. Harry Shum discussed Bing’s testing and findings in a blog post. Much of the findings seem pretty obvious. Clickthrough rates go down for results that are lower on the page, for example. Things get a little more interesting when users hit the back button, however, and this has influenced Bing’s strategy for showing results.

“On average, over 50% of users click on the first result on the page,” Shum writes. “From there we see a significant drop, with less than 1% of people clicking on the 8th link on the page. The figure below shows the click-through rate dropping from position 3 on, where position 3 could contain an Instant Answer, or the 2ndweb result that was pushed down because there was an Instant Answer above it, etc.”

“With this insight in mind, we looked for interesting cases where the click-through rate is much higher on lower results,” continues Shum. “One interesting case was after a user hits the back button. When users click on a result, then hit the browser back button, they typically look lower on the page. Statistics showed that the click-through rate on lower positions are a factor of five to eight times higher after a back button. This observation led to a change to Bing in the US in late May 2012 so that the SERP initially showed eight algorithmic results, and the page was extended to 12 after a back button. The controlled experiments showed that key metrics improved: users were executing fewer queries per session, pages rendered faster on average, and pagination to page 2, 3, etc. reduced by almost 2%.”

Now Bing is truncating search results pages more aggressively, showing just the first four elements (which can be either algorithmic results or instant answers), as well as as news results when relevant, and is extending the SERPs after the back button is pushed to 14 algorithmic results. According to Shum, this leads to more successful sessions for users, people finding what they’re looking for more quickly, a decline in queries per session, pages rendered faster (on average), and a 5% reduction in pagination.

The changes were pushed to all Bing users earlier this week (April 22nd, to be exact).

Yahoo announced a deal with Broadway Video to feature SNL content on Yahoo properties. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the news herself.
tw

Mayer added in a blog post:

Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker, or Tina Fey as Sarah Palin? As a lifelong Saturday Night Live fan, it is nearly impossible for me to pick my favorite skit. And, as a fan, I couldn’t be more excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Broadway Video to feature Saturday Night Live content exclusively on Yahoo! The partnership gives Yahoo! users exclusive access to the entire 38-year archive of SNL content as well as clips from the current season. Blues Brothers, the Coneheads, Church Chat, Wayne’s World, Coffee Talk, Pat, the Hanukkah Song – the list of tremendous clips goes on and on. Saturday Night Live has pervaded and defined our culture for decades.

That’s a lot of SNL. I wonder what percentage of that is actually funny.

The content will be available across Yahoo’s properties in an unspecified format. It’s not available yet. The company says it will announce when it is. More details will likely emerge at that point.

Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S 4 is about to hit shelves as one of the best Android smartphones available on the market.

The device is often compared with HTC One, its main competitor in the high-end tier category. Both smartphones have outstanding new features that compete with one anothe… (read more)

The Design West conference is underway this week in San Jose. It’s a four-day event launched last year as a technical conference for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals. AMD, Emerson and Wind River all have announcements from the event.

AMD announces new System-on-Chip. AMD announced the new AMD Embedded G-Series System-on-Chip (SOC) platform, a single-chip solution based on the AMD “Jaguar” CPU architecture and AMD Radeon 8000 Series graphics. Compared to the prior generation AMD G-Series APU the the new G-Series chip offers up to 113 percent improved CPU performance, and up to a 125 percent advantage when compared to the Intel Atom when running multiple industry-standard compute intensive benchmarks. The new processor family offers superior performance per watt in the low-power x86-compatible product category with 9W – 25W options. “As the Internet of Things permeates every aspect of our life from work to home and everything where in between, devices require high performance, I/O connectivity and energy efficiency in smaller packages,” said Colin Barnden, principal analyst, Semicast Research. “With this new AMD SOC design, the AMD Embedded G-Series platform offers the perfect mix of high performance, a small footprint, low energy use and full I/O integration to enable smaller form-factor embedded designs, cool and efficient operation, and simplified build requirements. AMD has leapfrogged the competition by combining the power of an x86 CPU and the performance of AMD Radeon graphics with the I/O interconnect all on a single die.”

Emerson launches new VPX system. Emerson Network Power (EMR) announced its latest embedded systems VPX system chassis, the KR8-VPX-3-6-1. Designed primarily for development, testing and lab duties, the KR8-VPX-3-6-1 can also be deployed in ground benign installations as it meets Emerson’s standard safety, electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and environmental requirements. The chassis supports up to five 3U and 6U Eurocard formats that are most popular with users of VMEbus. It will enable original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to rapidly develop, test and evolve their applications. “The new VPX-based KR8 chassis is designed to make it as easy as possible for developers to get ahead with their application development,” said Eric Gauthier, vice president product marketing for Emerson Network Power’s Embedded Computing business. “Coming hot on the heels of our recently announced VPX3000 system-level OpenVPX fanless enclosure and iVPX-7225 3U processor blade, this new development and deployment platform underlines Emerson Network Power’s commitment to having the building blocks in place to be a leading provider of custom and complete integrated solutions in this market.”

Wind River launches secure separation kernel.  Intel (INTC) subsidiary Wind River introduced the latest version of its VxWorks MILS Platform, a secure separation kernel that is compliant to the Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP). Part of the Wind River portfolio of trusted systems, the Type 1 hypervisor–based, multiple independent levels of security (MILS) platform is ready for use in security-critical systems that may require system-level high assurance evaluation or certification and accreditation (C&A). VxWorks MILS Platform partitions a single processor among multiple software components, with time and space resource allocation, information flow control, and fault isolation — all strictly enforced to conform to security policies defined by security architects and system integrators. “Companies responsible for creating robust infrastructure systems worldwide are demanding increased functionality and secure operation with high assurance of security from inadvertent or intentional errors or threats,” said Jim Douglas, senior vice president of marketing at Wind River. “VxWorks MILS can serve as the foundation for security-critical devices and systems in applications ranging from military and aerospace to industrial, medical, and automotive.”

I know it’s not in everyone’s backyard, but I thought the following was worth sharing – and maybe worth travel…

STEP-UP Entrepreneurship Training Day

CoCo coworking and collaborative space
Saturday, May 4, 2013 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (CDT)
Minneapolis, MN

 

CoCo, STEP-UP and Google are teaming up! Join us for a one-day Google for Entrepreneurs “entrepreneur-in-training” program for students participating in the Minneapolis Step-Up Program. The purpose of the day is to prepare students for their summer employment at small businesses in Minneapolis by equipping students with the knowledge and tools necessary to help them effectively think through problems, and create a business plan from scratch to solve real world challenges.

Draft Agenda: (9:00a – 4:10p)

• 9:00      – 9:30a Breakfast

• 9:30      – 9:45a Intros/Icebreaker

• 9:45      – 10:15a New technologies at Google/Moonshot projects

• 10:15      – 10:45a Panel on Career (feat. Googler, StepUp member, CoCo member(s))

• 10:45      – 11:30a How to Pitch Investors: Best Practices (CoCo entrepreneur to give presentation?)

• 11:30a      – 12:15p Lunch w. pre-assigned groups

• 12:15      – 1:45p Work groups (Split into 10 groups of 8)

• 1:45      – 2:00p Break

• 2:00      – 4:00p Pitch competition (Two rounds)

• 4:00      – 4:10p Judge/Announcement of winners

Riptide is a standalone expansion for Dead Island, the game that captured players’ imagination with its superb reveal trailer.

The actual released product delivered a highly divisive experience that was hampered by some post-launch problems and by some weird design decisions, and Riptide was supposed to fix the issues and realize the potential of… (read more)

In my time talking to people about the internet of things, we sometimes get so excited about the possibilities of the technology that we forget about the consumer who has to install it or has their own vision for connected living that they are trying to implement. So this week I brought my colleague Kevin Tofel onto the show to discuss how consumers should literally buy into the internet of things.

Tofel is our gadget and mobile device reporter (he has a podcast too!), and has been trying connected devices in his home (pictured) since 2010, so he has hands on experience setting up a home automation system using an Insteon-based system. But as, we discuss on the podcast, this limits the connected devices he brings into his home and it doesn’t work with his Nest thermostat for example. He offers some good tips for those planning their own connected homes such as planning ahead, picking a protocol and thinking about what you really want to achieve. Toward the end we even debate the merits of apps versus voice and gesture controls for telling our smart homes what to do.

(Download this episode)

Subscribe to the GigaOM Podcast RSS

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Kevin Tofel

• Kevin’s 41 solar panels aren’t connected to his Nest thermostat. Should they be?
• We offer two practical considerations consumers must think about before buying connected devices. Hint, one is the protocols you’ll be using.
• Why you need to plan ahead when buying connected devices for your home.
• Kevin predicts the death of the remote control and I complain about having too many apps.

PREVIOUS IoT PODCASTS:

Podcast: How the internet of things may make parents less worried but more neurotic

Podcast: Shark Week for the internet of things

What the Internet of Things can learn from Minecraft and Lemmings

Podcast: How IBM uses chaos theory, data and the internet of things to fix traffic

Electric Imp aims to make the Internet of Things devilishly simple

IoT podcast: When devices can talk, will they conspire against you?

What the internet of things can learn from Minecraft and Lemmings

Podcast: Why the internet of things is cool and how Mobiplug is helping make it happen

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters

Competition is grand. With Google planning to build out a fiber-to-the-home network in Austin, Texas next year, the local incumbent broadband providers are tweaking their models. AT&T has threatened to build its own fiber to the home, gigabit network provided it gets the same concessions from state and city officials that Google did. And Time Warner Cable? Well, it’s offering Austin subscribers free Wi-Fi.

In a blog post Wednesday evening, Time Warner said that existing customers with its standard cable package or above can log onto a city-wide Wi-Fi network the cable company is building out. Why now? Time Warner cites Google Fiber’s plans as a reason to kick its free Wi-Fi project into gear.

We’ve been rolling out our free WiFi network across our footprint for some time now, as part of our larger strategy to offer significantly more value to our Internet subscribers. Austin was in the game plan for 2013. But Google’s recent announcement encouraged us to deploy our network more aggressively now. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re ready to compete.

While paying $70 for 30 Mbps internet service from Time Warner Cable and now getting free Wi-Fi around town is nice, if Google offers me a deal where I get a gigabit connection for anywhere near the Kansas City price tag of $70, free Wi-Fi isn’t going to stop me. It won’t even make me pause.

Still while, I wait to hear where Google will deploy fiber and how much it will cost, I’ll gladly check out the TWC Wi-Fi network. So far it’s only in a few locations, but the company plans to expand it around town. Customers can sign into the network, called TWC WiFi and use same username/password combo they use sign log into their account. Non subscribers can also pay $2.95 per hour for access.

As far as responses to the threat of Google Fiber go, Time Warner’s is immediate and measured, especially when compared to AT&T’s. AT&T — with its fiber-to-the-node connections that currently top out at 24 Mbps — has a lot less than TWC has to offer when it comes to fending Google’s gigabit speeds. And after the 2009 experiment in broadband caps that Time Warner Cable attempted in Austin, it’s nice to have the city singled out for a benefit instead of a punitive pricing plan.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: The Ongoing Battle for the Digital Home
• OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

Having been an official company for less than a month, EMC and VMware backed Pivotallaunched as a stand-alone company Wednesday, detailing its new enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, and a $105 million investment from GE.

Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz addressed a webcast press event Wednesday in San Francisco, delivering the story line and mission of the newly formed company, positioning it as a new platform for a new era. Citing the changing market forces of cloud, big data, mobile, and social Maritz said that the enterprise needs a new class of applications that deliver better user experiences and that consumer-grade capabilities are needed in the enterprise. While still servicing the legacy needs of the enterprise, Pivotal One will integrate new data fabrics, modern programming frameworks, cloud portability for legacy systems.

“It is clear that there is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner,’ said Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal. “The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform. We are honored to work with GE, as they seek to drive new business value in the age of the Industrial Internet.”

Pivotal One

The Pivotal One enterprise PaaS platform combines cloud fabric, data fabric and application fabric, to address what the company sees as an $8 billion market that is expected to grow to $20 billion in five years. Three components make up the Pivotal One platform: Data Fabric, Cloud and Application Platform, and Pivotal Expert Services. The Pivotal HD  data fabric was announced in February by EMC Greenplum as a SQL parallel database on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System. With the addition of Greenplum HAWQ data services and Pivotal in-memory data grid technology, Pivotal HD provides proven technologies for analytical queries and transactional environments.

Pivotal Cloud and Application Platform is based on Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS, and Spring, the application development framework for enterprise Java. The application fabric provides a rich developer ecosystem that enables rapid application development and support for messaging, database services and robust analytic and visualization instrumentation. Pivotal Expert Services delivers the business value of agile development and sophisticated data analytics to enterprise companies on a project-by-project basis.

As a new stand-alone company Pivotal draws on an experienced set of talent from EMC, VMware, Greenplum, and many other technology giants. Along with Martiz, former EMC Greenplum executives Scott Yara and Bill Cook join Pivotal as Senior Vice President, Products and Platform, and Chief Operating Officer. Pivotal begins operations with 1,250 employees, including over 700 developers.

Strategic investment from GE

At the launch event Wednesday, GE announced its plans to invest approximately $105 million in Pivotal. The companies also announced their intent to enter into a broad research and development and commercial agreement aimed at accelerating GE’s ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers. The investment in Pivotal and new business agreement align with GE’s focus on the Industrial Internet. The partnership is key for GE, as it is working to develop a software platform that it will deliver as a service to industrial customers in aviation, transportation, healthcare, energy and manufacturing.

LinkedIn announced the new LinkedIn Contacts today. This is described as a way to bring all your contacts into one place.

Specifically, LinkedIn Contacts brings contacts from your address books, email accounts, and calendars together with your LinkedIn network.

“From these sources, we’ll automatically pull in the details of your past conversations and meetings, and bring these details directly onto your contact’s profile,” says LinkedIn’s Sachin Rekhi.

Introducing the New LinkedIn Contacts from LinkedIn

LinkedIn Contacts is available on LinkedIn.com, and has a standalone app for the iPhone. Stilly, you have to get an invite, and the company will start sending them to a limited number of users in the U.S. over the coming weeks.

While LinkedIn does not mention Android or other mobile platforms, one can only assume that the app will broaden its audience at some point.

Apple has been hit with a fine in China after being found to have illegally distributed copywrited materials. China Daily reports that the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ruled against Apple in a case brought by book writers claiming their works were being sold in Apple’s eBook store without their permission. The court determined that it was indeed Apple’s job to verify that works uploaded to its iOS book store for the iPhone and iPad were the property of the parties uploading them, and it fined Apple 730,000 yuan, or approximately $118,000, for its irresponsible verification policies.

Continue reading…

The EU has finally come out with a public document discussing Google’s proposal to end a lengthy antitrust investigation, and addressing the previously reported “market test,” which will give competitors and all those concerned a chance to offer feedback.

Should Google be required to change its search results? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The Commission is seeking feedback on the commitments Google has offered to address concerns.

On why it feels the need to intervene, the Commission says, “In high-tech markets in particular, network effects may lead to entrenched market positions. Google has had a strong position in web search in most European countries for a number of years now. It does not seem likely that another web search service will replace it as European users’ web search service of choice.”

“In this context, it is important for the Commission to intervene in order to ensure that Google’s prominent market position in web search does not affect the possibility for other competitors to innovate in neighbouring markets, including in the long-term,” it adds.

The Commission views Google as dominant in search and search advertising, and says it is abusing its dominant position in four areas: specialized search, content usage, exclusivity agreements with publishers for the provision of online search advertising on their sites, and contractual restrictions on the portability and management of online search advertising campaigns across AdWords and competing platforms.

Google has, of course, settled similar concerns here in the U.S. with the Federal Trade Commission, where it agreed to let sites remove content from specialized search results pages while allowing them to keep results in regular Google results (they recently released a tool for this), and to enable advertisers to “mix and copy ad campaign data” within third-party services that use the AdWords API.

Some competitors felt that the settlement did not go far enough. The proposal in Europe goes further. Here is the list of Google’s proposals verbatim (per the EU’s announcement):

Google offers for a period of 5 years to:

(i) – label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,

– clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and

– display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users,

(ii) – offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,

– offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,

– provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,

(iii) no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and

(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

A third party would be required to monitor Google’s implementation of its commitments.

Already, despite the increased responsibilities on Google’s part, competitors don’t think the proposals go far enough this time either.

Interestingly, FairSearch, the group of Google competitors, which has been most vocal about its opposition to Google’s practices since its incarnation when Google announced its intent to acquire ITA software three years ago, issued a statement on the market test before the EU’s document came out.

“The most important remedy to Google’s abuse of dominance is to require the search monopoly, which controls 94 percent of the market in Europe, to subject its own products and services to the same policy it uses to rank and display all other Websites,” the group said. “Since it has taken a year to extract a final proposal from Google, FairSearch believes the ‘market test’ should last three months to ensure that interested parties have enough time to carefully provide the European Commission with their expertise on the effectiveness of Google’s proposal. As we have said, we will comment on Google’s proposed remedies after the Commission shares them.”

FairSearch intends to study the “effects” of Google’s proposal, and has implied that it will have more suggestions for how to make things better.

Separately, FairSearch recently filed a complaint with the EU saying that Google is using its Android operating system to give it an additional unfair advantage in search. This is not addressed in Google’s current proposals, but the EU isn’t ignoring it. Here’s what the commission had to say about “other Google-related allegations”:

This process covers the four competition concerns that have been investigated as a matter of priority. The Commission is, however, thoroughly examining all other allegations brought to its attention by different market players with a view to deciding whether or not a further investigation of those issues is warranted. Google’s Android related business practices are part of those issues.

To be continued…

All those concerned with Google’s current proposals have a month to submit their feedback to the EU.

Do Google’s proposals go far enough? Should Google even be required to do all of what it has proposed? Will this help competitors significantly? Will it hurt Google significantly? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Marking a strategic expansion of its product portfolio, Fusion-io (FIO) announced that it has acquired hybrid storage appliance company NexGen Storage for $119 milion. NexGen appliances are based on Fusion ioMemory, and targeted at small to medium size enterprises. By using software in combination with ioMemory and standard disk drives, NexGen transforms industry-leading x86 server platforms into hybrid storage systems that provide the performance of an all-flash array at a fraction of the cost.

At the core of the NexGen hybrid storage system is ioControl Management software, which shares all storage resources and maintains simultaneous performance targets for multiple applications. It enables IT teams to control and prioritize acceleration for applications.

“Many SME businesses have lean IT teams and budgets, making it critical to offer an integrated and affordable entry point for flash powered application acceleration that delivers consistent performance, even under demanding workloads like VDI and analytics,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io CEO and Chairman. “The hybrid NexGen solution combines memory attached flash and disk on leading server platforms to provide a system tuned to deliver performance, price and capacity. With this acquisition, we will maintain the current NexGen product model as we transition to supporting customers’ preferred server platforms with our OEM partners.”

Paying approximately $114 million in cash and $5 million in stock for all of the outstanding stock, warrants and vested equity awards of NexGen, Fusion-io will add around 50 NexGen employees to its team. NexGen Storage CEO John Spiers posted a note on the company blog that there really never was an exit strategy – but that he sees this next phase of growth as a new beginning rather than the end.

“We architected our solution around Fusion-ioMemory because it offered the highest reliability, the most predicable performance, and because it is built as a platform for easy developer integration,” said Spiers, co-founder of NexGen and new Fusion-io Senior Vice President and General Manager, NexGen Products. “The NexGen ioControl software uniquely eliminates the need for another layer of latency in storage tiering and the bottlenecks introduced by SSD storage controllers, making it the ideal hybrid system to evolve into an open, software defined platform at Fusion-io.”

Fusion-io also reported financial results for the quarter Wednesday. The NexGen Storage acquisition directly addresses a strategy for the small and medium size businesses, while progress continues to be made with system vendor partners such as HP, IBM and Dell. During the quarterly earnings call the company noted that in the last quarter four customers placed orders in excess of $5 million, and that its “relationship with Facebook and Apple is strong”.  It was also noted that global music streaming service Spotify was added as a Fusion-io customer.

Database vendor Actian has acquired ParAccel, a scale-out, analytic database company whose technology underpins part of the Amazon Web Services Redshift data warehouse service. Terms of the deal are undisclosed.

For Actian, the deal means it has a big data offering to round out its current suite of database product that include the Ingres relational database, the Versant object database and the Vectorwise analytic database. Vectorwise is a single-server product best suited for data volumes between 1 and 50 terabytes, CEO Steve Shine told me, but ParAccel is a true big data technology designed to scale across many machines and potentially petabytes of data.

ParAccel has a litany list of big customers, as well as some major license deals for its massively parallel database technology. The most impressive is probably AWS, which uses ParAccel to power the analytic capabilities of its cloud-based Redshift data warehouse service. Amazon actually led a sizeable investment round in ParAccel that closed in July 2011. (I’ve seen it estimated between $15 million and $20 million.)

Actian is a relatively quiet company given its roughly $150 million in annual revenue — mostly outside the United States — but it could get a lot more attention soon. This is its fourth acquisition in the past five months, with the most recent being data integration and big data analytics specialist Pervasive Software, a deal that closed earlier in April. Now, Shine explained, it has database products to cover numerous use cases, as well as the tools to ensure quality control and merge data from many sources. Actian closed its acquisition of Versant in December.

The company also has a Hadoop story now. Pervasive’s DataRush platform can run on top of Hadoop and churn through lots of data MapReduce-style, but, it claims, much faster. ParAccel also integrates with Hadoop, meaning users can move data from Hadoop to ParAccel for faster, deeper analysis than MapReduce enables.

One has to assume ParAccel didn’t come cheap for Actian. ParAccel has raised, I believe, $93 million in venture capital since 2007 (it’s somewhat opaque about this information), and its competitors have sold for between $300 million (Greenplum to EMC) and $1.7 billion (Netezza to IBM) in 2010. HP also bought Vertica for an undisclosed amount in 2011.

Actian CEO Shine wouldn’t comment on the price, other than to say he expects big data will easily be the company’s biggest growth sector in terms of revenue over the next several years and that he wasn’t about to miss out on it.

“The market opportunity is enormous,” he said. “Absolutely enormous.”

I must say, though, I did not see the Actian acquisition coming. I predicted in 2011 that ParAccel would be acquired, but I expected it would happen a lot sooner and the buyer would be a much larger company.

For a little more on ParAccel, here’s an interview GigaOM did with Co-founder and CTO Barry Zane at our Structure: Data conference in 2011.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
• 9 Companies that Pushed the Infrastructure Discussion in 2010

Chef is cooking in the enterprise. Opscode’s open source automation platform is now supported by IBM and Microsoft, the company said, making it easier for enterprise IT users to use Chef to manage and scale their server environments. The announcements today ahead of the annual #ChefConf user conference mark a coming of age for Opscode and Chef, helping extent the benefits of the “DevOps” movement beyond its origins in the hyper-scale computing community.

DevOps, which combines many of the roles of systems administrators and developers, was popularized at large cloud builders with dynamic server environments. An example is Facebook, which recently adopted Chef to manage its fast-moving infrastructure. Opscode’s team features veterans of Amazon Web Services, a driving force in the growth of cloud services and DevOps.

“Facebook, Google and Amazon have figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure, and we are now seeing a similar trend in the enterprise,” said Jay Wampold, VP of Marketing at Opscode. “IT is a front-office imperative in how companies engage customers and users. Enterprises were not built from the ground up for this. Now they have to retool.”

The Code-Based Business”

Chef is central to Opscode’s vision for this shift to “code-based businesses.” Chef is an open source framework using repeatable code – organized as “recipes” and “cookbooks” – to automate the configuration and management process for virtual servers. It enables users to deploy infrastructure as code across any operating system from Windows to Unix and Linux, across physical, virtual or cloud infrastructures.

In February Opscode unviled Chef 11, an updated version written in the Erlang programming language and using a PostgresSQL database. That’s a change from previous versions, which used Ruby as the configuration language and CouchDB as the database. The shift to an SQL database has helped make Opscode’s offerings more attractive to enterprise customers using Private Chef to automate infrastructure in their own data centers.

The IBM integration will further support this shift. Chef will now support IBM Power Systems and the AIX operating system, allowing enterprise customers to use Chef to automate the configuration of AIX-based cloud infrastructure. Opscode will provide IBM customers with tools to build and manage cloud resources and applications in large-scale AIX compute environments.

“Our collaboration with IBM is addressing a major transformation facing enterprises as they code their businesses to thrive in the digital economy,” said Mitch Hill, CEO of Opscode. “Leveraging the innovation and extensibility of open source, including OpenStack and Chef, Opscode and IBM are enabling businesses to maximize the potential of the cloud in rapidly delivering goods and services to market.”

Cookbooks for WebSphere, Windows Azure

IBM and Opscode are also collaborating on creating cookbooks for the IBM Software portfolio, beginning with the WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile. This cookbook will provide reusable content to allow the rapid provisioning and full application lifecycle management of WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile applications.

“By collaborating on product integration and Chef Community content, we’ll be able to offer enterprise businesses comprehensive solutions for gaining the most value out of cloud, with minimal risk.” said Moe Abdula, VP, SmartCloud Foundation at IBM.

Abdula will be presenting on #ChefConf’s main stage tomorrow, one of a number of enterprise presenters from companies including Disney, Forrester Research, General Electric and Nordstrom. About 700 attendees are expected at the event in San Francisco, part of a larger open source Chef community features more than 1,300 individual contributors, 200 corporate contributors, and 900 cookbooks. Since last year’s #ChefConf, Opscode says it has seen its commercial customer base double, including many Fortune 500 enterprises using Private Chef to build in-house clouds.

“A lot of mainstream enterprises are talking about revolutionizing the enterprise, and adopting Chef broadly,” said Wampold. “That involves a cultural change, and getting the whole group trained on Chef and integrated with the community.”

ChefConf is part of that process. So is Opscode’s collaboration with Microsoft Open Technologies to deliver a series of Chef Cookbooks providing cloud automation capabilities for Microsoft Azure, including cookbooks for automating Drupal and WordPress deployments on Windows Azure. Opscode also announced today that Chef provides integration with Microsoft’s IaaS offering, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.

“The enterprise engagement and sales process has grown,” said Wampold. “We can take credit for building a great product. But the business needs his come around more quickly than anyone expected. “It’s clear the traditional enterprise vendors like IBM and Microsoft are seeing this transition. These companies are knocking on our door because they see us as a key enabler.”

Verizon Wireless is preparing to offer $100 billion to acquire Vodafone’s stake in the companies’ U.S. joint venture, Verizon Wireless. Verizon currently owns 55% of the nation’s top wireless carrier and it has hired advisors to help it prepare the bid for Vodafone’s 45% stake, Reuters reported. Earlier reports suggested Verizon and Vodafone were discussing various ways the two might resolve their relationship, but issues over valuation were holding up discussions. According to this new report, Verizon is now prepared to pursue Vodafone’s Verizon Wireless stake more aggressively. “It hopes to start discussions with Vodafone soon for a friendly agreement but is prepared to take a bid public if the British company does not engage,” an unnamed source told Reuters.