Open Compute is the initiative set up by the company to share the designs of its cost-efficient boxes and hardware with the rest of the community. And the amount of interest the project managed to attract is hardly surprising: Facebook, the prime user of its technology, is touting an impressive 38 percent reduction in power consumption and a 24 slash to overheads.

“With Open Compute, Facebook, has become the ‘tail wagging the dog,’ causing hardware manufacturers to focus more on providing value for business customers than on building faster machines than the competition,” said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.  ”In time, this will enable CIOs to buy computers without all of the features of more expensive systems, he said.”

A recent decision by Hewlett-Packard, the manufacturer that assembles Facebook’s metal, seems to confirm this observation.  HP director of marketing Glenn Keels said that his company is not unwilling to cash in on the potential demand for the Coyote and Coyote 2, saying that customers falling under specific criteria are eligible to order the servers. It will probably be a while until they hit general availability though, if at all, but there’s a strong chance according to Valdes.

In a recent Intelligence Note, the IC3 says travelers’ attempting to connect to Internet hotspots in overseas hotels are receiving pop-up windows offering an update to a legitimate, popular application. When they accept the update, however, their laptops are actually infected with malware. The note does not identify the software or the countries involved or provide details on the malware.

The FBI, which is actively investigating the incidents, recommends that business, academic, and government travelers update their software before going abroad, and that they be suspicious of apparently routine updates they receive while connected through hotels. If they do need to update while overseas, it recommends that they download directly from the vendor’s Web site rather than clicking on links in popups.

Further, the note says that Americans who believe their laptops have been infected through this exploit should contact their local FBI office and report the infection on the ICE’s website.

Data visualization software maker 

Gartner estimates that business intelligence revenue rose 16.4 percent last year, which made it the second fastest growing segment in the software industry at the time. That percentage also represents the exact sales increase the second fastest growing BI vendor has seen in that period–more than five times less than what
reported.

“Tableau’s remarkable growth is a symbol of one of the most important trends in the industry: the consumerization of enterprise technology,” said Christian Chabot, CEO and co-founder of Tableau Software.”We are ushering in a golden era of fast, easy, visual analytics for everyone. It’s a sea change in business analytics.”

Not long ago the company managed to snag a spot on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms as well. It was listed as a ‘challenger’ based on “its ability to execute and completeness of vision,” in the Gartner’s own words.

There are many software vendors making headway in the analytics space now, and competition is heating up as a result.  SAP has its eyes on the bigger picture with its HANA in-memory data crunching appliance, which as of yesterday is officially the single most powerful database of its kind. The platform is defending the title with a performance benchmark of 10 billion transactions, 100 terabytes of data and 200 million query responses.

The conversation kicked off with a discussion of how Bussmann was recently named the most socially-active CIO out there, ahead of his counterparts at Google and IBM. Basically, Bussmann says that it’s just become a natural part of his day – SAP partners, peers, customers, analysts, press, all of them have their own social media presences, and it’s simply a better way to stay in touch.

The fact that he finds his own productivity and efficiency increase due to the collaborative aspects of social media makes him a living, breathing proof of social’s place in the enterprise, he says. Later, the conversation would turn to the value of social media to SAP at large, with Bussmann affirming the value of the feedback that user communities can bring to the table in real time.

In short, social media needs to part of any modern executive’s workflow, or else risk losing critical insight. In fact, there’s a behavior shift coming, and executives are going to expect to be kept up-to-date with social media and the associated analytics all the time, in the same way that most decision-makers are glued to their e-mail. To that end, real-time analytics need to be made easy to consume and mobile.

Another growth area for SAP is in mobile device management, Bussmann says. CIOs still have a pressing need for solutions to help bring Apple iPads and iPhones online and ready for business. Mobile device management (MDM) is a growing field, and bring-your-own-device isn’t going away in light of rising smartphone and tablet sales. Bussmann highly recommended that CIOs make the investment in mobile.

Mobile apps, Bussmann notes, are a country-specific, product-specific and user-specific issue. There are questions of infrastructure (online/offline functionalities), of device type (smartphones vs. old-school phones), and generally, customer needs and behaviors.

On a topic change, Bussmann says that big data is a big value driver in today’s IT landscape. When it comes to social, mobile, analytics, the cloud and everything else that’s been on SAP’s agenda at SAPphire this week, he has 5 percent of his budget earmarked for having it deployed on internal infrastructure. Internally, SAP is using big data to analyze the transactions of 4,000 sales reps, judging whether a deal is likely to go through based on mountains of past experiences recorded in a database and make intelligent choices around prioritization.

For the second half of 2012, Bussmann says his priority is on leveraging more of this cloud and big data technologies for SAP’s internal IT usage. That goes especially for ERP deployed on the SAP HANA in-memory database, a spotlighted product at SAP SAPhire this year. And, as employees come in to SAP with their own experiences, they’re going to be expecting a certain level of mobile readiness, and it’s up to Bussmann to get SAP there.

And, on a final note, Bussmann noted that SAP has already applied gamification principles to its SAP Mentor program, and that yes, that’s a trend that’s only going to keep growing.

For the full interview with Bussmann, check out the video below.

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Understanding that kind of ambiguity is powerful enough, but Google’s also leveraging Knowledge Graph to give users better summaries of their search terms: Again using Google’s example, a search for Marie Curie will return a brief overview of her life and times rather than just the dates she lived. It also draws connections between a searched term and other, related people, places and, well, things.

This may sound like a big data solution to you, and you’d be right. Singhal writes that Knowledge Graph uses 500 million data objects and 3.5 billion facts and relationships,  with most of that information drawn from publicly-available sources like Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. Of course, Google being Google, Singhal promises that the search giant will fine-tune it based on what people search for, and whatever other data it can scrape from the web. And just like with an enterprise big data solution, Google is hoping that end users can draw useful insights from the data it correlates.

Google’s doing a phased rollout of Knowledge Graph results, and it may take some time before you see the new features. Once you get it, though, you’ll be able to click between different interpretations of your search string in the lower left-hand corner.

This is a good example of how Google’s flexible architecture enables it to add new, more cutting-edge technologies to its cloud without having to reinvent the wheel. At a time when “continuous deployment” is the watchword in the DevOps space, and service providers look to integrate big data as business value adds, Google’s managed to do both in an impressive display of service flexibility. Google’s overall cloud strategy may still be in considerable question, but the strength of its technology shouldn’t be.

On a similar note, yesterday, Google launched a Research Pane for Google Docs which enables inline web searches, with data drawn from the Google ecosystem, and the ability to include said data directly in the document with footnotes. For Google, it’s about convergence – convergence of your data and its data, as per its recent privacy policy shift, for better or for worse.

Now comes the news that developers may now set up a HANA database on Amazon Web Services at no cost. This is huge. HANA is the in-memory database that SAP is positioning to compete directly with Oracle and SAP.

It’s a major coup for the SAP Mentor community, and people like Vijay Vijayasankar, John Applebee, Jon Reed and Dennis Howlett, who have been pushing SAP for the past two years to take this kind of step.

It’s noteworthy, too, as SAP is now without question the most developer friendly enterprise technology company in the market. IBM nor Oracle nor HP can match right now the level of commitment that SAP is making to developers.

Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. The signup page includes detailed instructions for the setup.

SAP is making three different sizes available for developers. As noted on the SAP community network site, you can use the AWS pricing calculator, which is pre-configured for 4 hours of daily usage on the smallest available size.

More information:

I talk a good deal about Service Culture and the importance of a top-down commitment to both customers and employees, but it is also imperative to invest in an infrastructure that supports near- and long-term goals. How much to invest and where to invest takes careful planning. The investment decisions you make now, will certainly impact your ability to deliver quality customer support years from now. Here are a few key considerations to keep in mind when making investment decisions.

• Know your customers’ future requirements and where the industry is headed. Adjustments and refinements should be made along the way, but when it comes to major infrastructure investments, early action is mandatory. While voice of the customer and big data analytics provide critical inputs, support organizations should also monitor industry trends. This video “Support Services – Trends and Best Practices” featuring IDC’s Elaina Stergiades provides a summary of key trends we have been monitoring.
• Seek to provide new, innovative solutions – beyond what customers are requesting. Here are a couple of real life examples:
  • Years before social networking vehicles such as Twitter and Facebook were common place, EMC introduced online support communities. This early insight and investment allowed us to build the very useful and active community in place today.
  • In 2008, EMC introduced Live Chat. Based on initial success, in 2010 service availability was extended to technical and nontechnical issues of all severities, and new best practices were implemented. Customers weren’t asking for this but we saw the potential benefits and invested. It has been wildly successful. Live Chat use has grown over 300% year-over-year since 2010 and has become the support channel of choice. In fact, customers are experiencing problem resolution at least 33% faster than other traditional channels. Continued investments have expanded Live Chat to all products and with multi-lingual support.
• Be prepared to meet corporate growth targets, distribution of customers, and expansion into new and emerging markets. These investments can range from the addition of staff, skills and partnerships, to new facilities – possibly in parts of the world where you haven’t done business before. For example, EMC recently opened a new Customer Support Center in Utah. The decision to make such a significant investment was in response to several strategic requirements including enhanced levels of support for EMC’s growing customer base in the Western US and Latin/South America. (See the Why We Planted a Flag in Utah executive blog post for more.)

In short, we must support customers’ current needs, anticipate their future requirements – often before customers do, and invest in process and infrastructure to successfully meet them. Wish there was an “easy button” for that.

The idea is that SAP customers can upgrade their deployment by purchasing service packs rather than new licenses, and this latest one packs more than enough marketability value.  First and foremost, the in-memory analytics appliance now features deep integration with Hadoop.

Users can access data stored in Hive and Hadoop directly from HANA and the Sybase IQ database, a capability made more powerful thanks to the addition of text data processing. Being able to carry out ‘linguistic analysis,’ as the company calls it, is meant to  improve the way clients are able to implement the enhanced version of HANA in their SAP environment.

“We are very excited to work with SAP to provide customers with real-time insights from their Hadoop environments using our complementary solutions,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and CEO, Cloudera. “The SAP real-time data platform, combined with the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution, will deliver unmatched capabilities in next-generation ‘big data’ applications and analytics to the enterprise.”

On top of the Hadoop integration the platform also supports the R statistical language, and for the first time it has been opened up to developers via a partnership with Amazon. AWS now features a pre-configured HANA instance that essentially provides the foundation for a data-driven cloud app, as well as a considerably broadened outlook for the technology itself.

Finally,  SAP announced eight new applications designed to supplement HANA and expand the core platform to more key areas in the enterprise.   These solutions aim to make the appliance accessible to the less technical user base, such as the SAP Collections Insight tool that lets sales reps design visualized profiles of clients.

Perhaps most significant is the news that SAP HANA stands as the world’s largest in-memory database. It can handle ten billion records, 100 terabytes of data and 200 million query responses.

It also delivers a clear message to Oracle that SAP is after them and has the data to prove it.

Here’s a quick break down on what SAP announced today:

A HANA Service Pack new releases that include:
- Ability to integrate data from Hadoop
- New text (unstructured data) search capabilities
- Interoperability with R, the statistical programming environment.

Availability for developers on AWS to build custom analytic applications
A HANA start-up accelerator
A new support for scale-out, multi-node HANA deployments
A visual intelligence application
New HANA applications

One aspect of this I find of partiuclar inrterest is the new data visualization environment for HANA.

SAP Visual Intelligence (SVI)is a desktop version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software and powered by the SAP HANA platform. It acquires data from corporate and personal data sources without scripting. Users can then analyze it and create visualizations.

It’s a move that puts SAP in competition with companies like Tabeau, which is also focusing on hooking its data visualization engine with big data analytics environments .

It does on the fly analysis, which shows the power that HANA offers. It’s also further proof that SAP is focusing on providing more reasons to use HANA in a business setting.

Visual Intelligence does not require HANA. It connects to and reads information from SAP HANA. That points to how HANA will mature as a technological foundation for SAP applications.

Other aspects of the news that should be noted:

Hadoop: SAP announced this originally last Fall. it points to how Hadoop can act as a store for active data that can flow into HANA for real-time analysis.SAP is partnering with Cloudera, which will provide the Hadoop distribution. It will read HANA and load to Hive and Hadoop.

Startup Accelerator: SAP realizes that there is a need for the big data ecosystem to build out.

More AWS Integration: AWS is an important partner. By offering custom app development on AWS, SAP can target the ISV market for cloud apps. That’s also a focus for AWS. Good partnership.