Democratisation of data inside a company to make a business agile is important, says Kee Siong Ng, senior data scientist at EMC's Greenplum.Traditionally, he says, there is a conflict over how to classify data mining -- is it an information technology application or part of the wider business. "You see it moving back and forth," said Kee Siong in his keynote address at the 2012 SUNZ Conference in Wellington last week. "One thing you must do is try to formalise that relationship, and really emphasise this collaborative environment," he says. "You might have the infrastructure being managed by IT, but the data side is really owned by the business." This division, he says, is a major problem in a lot

Read more: Deep into big data

Cisco's appeal of the European Commission's approval of the $8.5 billion Microsoft/Skype union is customer driven, Cisco CEO John Chambers said this week.

Addressing a small group of reporters via TelePresence at Cisco facilities around North America, Chambers said customer desire for interoperability forced Cisco to appeal the EC ruling. Cisco issued its appeal last week, citing interoperability concerns between Microsoft/Skype and its own video offerings as well as those from other vendors.

BACKGROUND: Microsoft to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion

Cisco and Microsoft are fierce competitors in unified communications

Read more: Cisco: Customers drove us to block Microsoft/Skype

Microsoft is spending about US$130 million to build a new datacenter in Dublin, as it needs more room to run cloud services there, the company said on Thursday.

The expansion is a direct result of increased demand for cloud services such as Office 365, Windows Live, Xbox Live, Bing and Windows Azure in Europe, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft's new datacenter will be next-door to its existing one in Dublin. Construction of the datacenter has begun, said a

Read more: Microsoft is building a new datacenter in Dublin

One of the challenges companies often face when using Hadoop to aggregate massive volumes of structured and unstructured data is finding a way to efficiently control and manage user access to that data.

Zettaset, a Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor of tools for managing big data, on Wednesday announced a new security initiative to help companies address that issue.

Under its SHadoop initiative, Zettaset will integrate new functions into its existing Hadoop Orchestrator platform that will allow IT administrators to implement role-based access control over Hadoop environments.

The new tools will allow administrators to better

Read more: Zettaset to offer role-based access control for Hadoop

Now OnLive has released a new option for its OnLive Desktop service, OnLive Desktop Plus. This Plus version isn’t free: You’ll need to pony up $5 per month for the service (the app itself is still free). But the Plus version does add Internet Explorer 9 to the software suite, along with access to third-party storage sites including Box.net and Dropbox. You also get "priority access", which means you’re served first if the OnLive servers ever get overloaded.

Unfortunately, as yet OnLive Desktop Plus isn't available here in the UK. According to a message

Read more: OnLive Desktop Plus review

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