• An all-time high 48% of organisations say cloud BI is either “critical” or “very important” to their operations in 2019
• Marketing and sales place the greatest importance on cloud BI in 2019
• Small organisations of 100 employees or fewer are the most enthusiastic, perennial adopters and supporters of cloud BI
• The most preferred cloud BI providers are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

These and other insights are from Dresner Advisory Services’ 

Over the past year, I’ve had the good fortune of sitting down with leading enterprises to speak with CIOs, enterprise architects, database engineering leaders, and more. Many of these discussions centred on the evolving world of business applications and databases and the challenges of digital transformation initiatives (customer experience, digital banking experience, data-as-a-service, real-time analytics).

• Alphabet/Google is now the most innovative company in the world according to BCG, unseating Apple’s 13-year dominance of their annual rankings
• Strong AI innovators are over three times more likely to have deep expertise in big data analytics
• The ten most innovative companies in the world extensively use AI and platforms today to grow faster than competitors and markets

As more CIOs and CTOs focus attention on selecting the best-fit IT infrastructure for their particular cognitive computing needs, vendors of semiconductor technologies are exploring new ways to optimize their investment in solutions at the edge of enterprise networks.

Revenue from the sale of artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets for edge inference and inference training will grow at 65% and 137% respectively between 2018 and 2023, according to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research.

During...

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it was launching an open source value-added distribution for search and analytics engine Elasticsearch. As AWS evangelist Jeff Barr put it, the launch would “help continue to accelerate open source Elasticsearch innovation” with the company “strong believers in and supporters of open source...

Cloudera posted total revenues of $144.5 million (£108.9m) for its most recent quarter, and while it may have disappointed investors, the company said its ‘enterprise data cloud’ strategy with Hortonworks on board will help turn things around.

Of total revenues for the quarter ending January 31 – up 36% from this time last year – 85% of it came from subscriptions, while the remainder came from...

Augmented analytics, continuous intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) are among the top trends in big data and analytics that have significant disruptive potential over the next three to five years, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

"The size, complexity, distributed nature of data, speed of action and the continuous intelligence required by digital business means that rigid and centralized architectures and tools break down,” said Donald Feinberg, vice president at...

Open source database provider Redis Labs has announced Redis Source Available License (RSAL), representing a modification of previous licensing terms for its modules and looking towards clarification with the open source and developer communities.

The company had in August changed its terms to Apache2 modified with Commons Clause with more than one eye on the biggest cloud providers, who were packaging Redis technology into proprietary offerings and pocketing...

Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian promised an aggressive approach to enterprise cloud strategy going forward – and the company has immediately put its money where its mouth is with the acquisition of California and Tel Aviv-based startup Alooma.

Alooma aims to solve a key problem for enterprise organisations in their move to the cloud by offering a single data pipeline which is able to crunch data from various...

Reports of the death of the relational database have been greatly exaggerated – at least in the enterprise.

According to a new study from Progress Software – the company’s latest annual data connectivity report – while the on-premises relational database behemoths of SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle have declined year on year, the cloud push is not yet forthcoming for mission-critical workloads.

It’s another big day for big data; analytics platform provider Databricks has raised $250 million (£193.3m) in a series E funding round and now sits atop a $2.75 billion valuation.

The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and featured participation from Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). In a statement, Ben Horowitz said that a16z was “thrilled” to invest in this funding round and that Databricks was the “clear winner in the big data...

When Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest big data behemoths, first announced they were coming together in a $5.2 billion blockbuster merger in October, the questions were almost infinite. Yet the most important two seemed to be: why now? And what does the future hold?

For any organisation in this era, there is a realisation on how data is critical for business needs and operations.

An enormous amount of data has been produced already after the disruption of cloud computing into various types of organisation, be it education, finance, healthcare or manufacturing. Today, organisations are more concerned about the data which has been developed in the last 15 to 20 years due to the surge of IT infrastructure.

This data and applications are probably not being used...

In the past, machine vision was limited to highlight-controlled environments, costly sensor technology, and restrictive feature detection. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to change the market, creating new classes of applications and significant new opportunities.

Machine vision is in the process of transition and dramatic expansion. Deep learning (DL) techniques are taking machine vision systems to next level, driving the mass adoption in several industries - including the automotive, retail,...

In today’s enterprise, your data is your lifeblood. Everything you do and every decision you make is about how to create, utilise and protect your data. IT resilience, data protection and backups all play a part in making sure that your data is always accessible and available when you need it.

As part of your IT resiliency strategies, you build processes and infrastructure to ensure mission-critical applications can be recovered as quickly as possible via a...

More CIOs and CTOs are looking for digital transformation and smart technology solutions to their line of business leader innovation requirements. Blockchain and related distributed ledger technologies are already making an impact outside of the finance and insurance space from which they emerged.

Promising new use cases are being trialed in a number of digitally transforming sectors -- notably supply chain management, retail and consumer, arts and entertainment, and public services.

Blockchain applications market...

Cloud computing platforms and applications are proliferating across enterprises today, serving as the IT infrastructure driving new digital businesses. The following roundup of cloud computing forecasts and market estimates reflect a maturing global market for cloud services, with proven scale, speed and security to support new business models.

CIOs who are creating compelling business cases that rely on cloud platforms as a growth catalyst are the architects enabling these new business initiatives to...

The money just keeps rolling in for Snowflake Computing. The San Mateo-based data warehousing provider has announced $450 million (£341m) in additional growth funding to help grow its organisation and explore new strategies.

Snowflake offers a comprehensive and complete data warehouse – in other words, repositories of integrated data from at least one source, usually more – in the cloud, with the capability...

From competitors to friends; big data behemoths Cloudera and Hortonworks are to merge in a $5.2 billion (£3.97bn) deal.

Cloudera, which went for IPO last year, noted Hortonworks, which went public in 2014, as a competing open source player in its filing to the SEC....

When emerging technologies, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things converge, a ‘gestalt shift’ will occur, according to a new book. “The character of the experience will drastically change,” write Mark van Rijmenam and Dr. Philippa Ryan in Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World. “All of a sudden, we can see the world through a different, more technologically advanced, lens and this opens up a completely new...