SAP aims for bigger presence in 'big data' with Hadoop partnerships, new apps

Few tech buzzwords of late have been more prevalent than “big data,” and SAP is hoping to make sure the market knows it’s hip to the trend with a series of new announcements.

Perhaps the most significant announcement, made at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, concerns a pair of new agreements under which SAP will resell and support Apache Hadoop distributions from Intel and Hortonworks.

While SAP had already begun building bridges between its own products and Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing, the Intel and Hortonworks deals will allow it to offer customers a more well-rounded set of Hadoop tools.

“We have signed a formal agreement driven by both companies at the executive level to make HANA plus Hadoop a winning combination for our customers,” said Irfan Khan, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Big Data, in an interview.

Beyond the reseller deals with Intel and Hortonworks, SAP plans to continue certifying and supporting other Hadoop distributions.

While definitions of “big data” vary, in general the term refers to the large amounts of unstructured data being generated by websites, social media services, sensors and other sources. Big data discussions also often refer to the “three Vs,” or the velocity, variety and volume of information streams.

SAP plans to roll out a series of specialized applications that focus on specific big data use cases. One announced Tuesday is aimed at manufacturers and called Demand Signal Management. It focuses on capturing and crunching what SAP calls “downstream demand” data, such as from retail point-of-sale systems, for insights that could help marketing teams and supply chain managers operate more effectively.

Other big data-themed applications target areas such as fraud management and customer engagement. Ten applications are in “ramp-up,” SAP’s term for its early-adopter program, and the vendor has “an aggressive timeline for the remainder of this year and leading into 2014,” Khan said.

Finally, SAP has created a new Data Science organization within the company.

This team brings together about 100 data scientists, people with high-level degrees in mathematics, and will be “closely aligned with SAP’s overall big data strategy,” according to a statement.

More details of SAP’s big data strategy and products will likely come in October at the Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Chris Kanaracus

View the original article here

Want Android your way? Stay tuned for Cyanogen's hardware partnerships

Cyanogen, maker of CyanogenMod, one of the most popular third-party respins of Android, is planning something major. It isn't just a new version of its CyanogenMod software, it's a full-blown business plan that may include making CyanogenMod available as a preload on at least one phone maker's hardware.

Like the DD-WRT or Tomato firmware for routers, CyanogenMod's grown famous with some 8 million-plus Android fans. It adds tons of useful features not found in stock Android, removes carrier- and device-maker's bloatware, and works with a plethora of devices, both new and old. Other respins of Android are in turn based on CyanogenMod as well (such as Miui), as the project is open source.

Unfortunately, CyanogenMod -- and third-party versions of Android generally -- is notoriously difficult to load onto phones. Most Android devices ship with locked bootloaders, which requires a different installation process for each device.

Cyanogen co-founder Steve Kondik has decided it's time for a different approach. After raising $7 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, he left his previous job (working for Samsung since 2009, which gave him little time to run Cyanogen), hired a team of 17 developers, and formulated a plan to make CyanogenMod into a mobile OS that's all the more "by the users, for the users."

Aggressive end-user testing and feedback has long been a staple component of CyanogenMod's lifecycle. Kondik wants to not only keep it that way, but make it even easier to get on board the CyanogenMod train.

Among the first things Kondik has announced is a streamlined CyanogenMod installer that will soon be delivered through Google's Play store. The idea is to automate the install process as completely as possible, the best solution for end-users short of delivering CyanogenMod as a preload.

But plenty of gray areas remain. For one, whether or not Google will allow such software to be delivered by way of Play hasn't been established. Worst-case scenario: The user would have to sideload the CyanogenMod installer, which might prove little better than performing the whole process by hand.

A second question that's been asked (by The Verge, among others) and answered only vaguely: How does Cyanogen plan to make money if its core product -- the firmware itself -- remains a free item?

One obvious possibility is via a cut of hardware sales via a partner. That's Cyanogen's other big push. It wants to make a deal of some sort with a device vendor, although the name of the partner hasn't been announcer yet. (An educated guess: It's Samsung, by way of Kondik's previous job.)

Cyanogen could also make money by way of offering multiple versions of the product -- a free core version, with other features available either only as a for-pay item or only shipped with a hardware purchase. Yet another possibility is offering for-pay services of some kind: file storage, phone backup and restore functions, and so on.

What Kondik is trying to avoid, though, is becoming the very thing he hates. In his mind, the biggest issue with mobile devices running Android is that Google has turned them into "mobile cash registers" -- systems designed to monetize the users' behaviors first, with everything else a distant second. That's going to prove difficult, as software and hardware both become race-to-the-bottom commodities.

One other plan that Kondik has in store, though, makes perfect sense on the face of it: A name change and rebranding for the company, probably sometime next year. Let's see if the company's up to the task of delivering itself to consumers as frictionlessly as Google has.

This story, "Want Android your way? Stay tuned for Cyanogen's hardware partnerships," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

View the original article here

Microsoft's deal with AT&T shows the new path for cloud partnerships

Microsoft's newly announced joint venture with AT&T, in which AT&T customers get VPN access to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, may be a sign of how the cloud giants are looking in novel places -- like telecom providers -- for partnerships and alliances.

Cloud vendors and telecom outfits have been slowly knitting together partnerships in which the telcos provide high-grade, high-speed data transports for customers looking to move their data into (or out of) the cloud.

AT&T teamed up with IBM late in 2012 for a similar initiative. There, customers could connect to IBM's cloud resources via AT&T's VPN, allowing protected movement of data between private and public clouds. Before that in 2011, VMware partnered with Softbank Telecom in Japan to allow customers to shuttle data between their own private cloud and Softbank's public cloud.

Most recently, enterprise cloud host Savvis -- a subsidiary of Internet provider CenturyLink -- partnered with VMware to provide vCloud-powered colocation, again to provide businesses with a protected channel to and from the cloud.

No discussion of this issue would be complete without some mention of Verizon purchasing cloud-service provider Terremark in 2011 -- with both Verizon and Terremark having been major VMware vCloud users.

Having cloud outfits reach out to carriers and network providers as partners only makes sense. The cloud lives and dies on its network links. Consequently, the more direct a route that can be provided into and out of the cloud, the easier it is for customers to get on board -- especially those with multiterabyte migrations that require a robust and secure network.

The release for the new Microsoft-AT&T joint venture boasts that their VPN solution will provide "as much as 50 percent lower latency than the public Internet." That said, it won't be possible to test claims like that until the first half of 2014, when the partnership finally goes online.

What also remains to be seen is how exclusive these deals could get. Right now, it's in the best interests of both parties to work with as many partners as possible, but it's not unforeseeable that we could see exclusive deals between cloud and network providers, perhaps for major discounts on both the cloud resources and the network access. Such a thing would inspire the ire of many an advocate for Net neutrality, and given how many resources are being moved into the cloud these days, they might not be wholly wrong.

This story, "Microsoft's deal with AT&T shows the new path for cloud partnerships," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

View the original article here