The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Microsoft had beat Google and Apple to the punch in the quest to buy R2 Studios. But it wasn't until Microsoft issued the confirmation on January 10 that the Softies confirmed the deal was done.
R2 Studios founder Blake Krikorian will be Corporate Vice President
of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), which is the
home of the Xbox. Krikorian will report to Marc Whitten, Chief Product
Officer for IEB, Microsoft officials said. Krikorian was the co-founder,
chairman and CEO of Sling Media Inc., inventor of the Slingbox.
Microsoft's press release didn't detail how or when R2 Studios'
technologies and patents will fit into Microsoft's product line-up. But
Microsoft, like R2 Studios, has been active in the home-automation technology space.
GeekWire unearthed late last week some interesting patent information about R2 Studios. GeekWire noted: "Krikorian’s company acquired more than two dozen patents and
patent applications last year covering a wide range of automation
technologies in the home. One of them is a broad patent for using a
central server in conjunction with a portable remote as a master control
for everything in the home — including televisions, computers, stereos,
lights, ovens, alarm clocks and more."
Microsoft is in the process of evolving the Xbox from a gaming
console to a home-entertainment/hub. Adding home-automation technologies
to the platform would seem to fit right in with this effort.
Summary:
Microsoft has purchased R2 Studios, a startup working on home-automation
applications, and is folding the new company into its Xbox division.
SAP takes ERP in-memory
Today at a press briefing held simultaneously in Frankfurt, New York and Palo Alto, SAP AG announced that its ubiquitous Business Suite software now runs on its venerable in-memory database, SAP HANA. For a detailed accounting of the news side of the event, read our own Rachel King’s story:
At the New York event, The room was full, those in attendance
were paying very close attention, and the SAP folks in all three cities
were visibly stoked. SAP on HANA is a breakthrough for the German
company, for reasons of technology, market share and business models.
It may also be a breakthrough for Big Data and analytics amongst
traditionally conservative, blue chip companies all around the world. Analytics, in context Covered SAP HANA, the German software company’s in-memory database, in some depth before. One of my HANA posts was titled “SAP HANA does Big Data...with ERP, CRM and BI savvy.”
My point in using that title was that SAP, a company that is focused on
business software and which has acquired business intelligence company BusinessObjects followed by database company Sybase,
brings a lot of enterprise context with it to the Big Data space.
Today’s announcement says that context is no longer in the background,
but is on-board, in the in-memory database.
Hasso Plattner (Photo Credit: Michael Krigsman)
SAP’s Co-Founder, Chairman of the Supervisory Board and Chief Software Advisor, Hasso Plattner,
spoke in depth about what it meant to bring SAP Business Suite onto the
HANA platform. Essentially, Plattner said that the separation of
analytic databases from transactional ones is a hindrance to business
success. Mr. Plattner, tear down this wall Plattner
reasons that transactional/analytical separation is arbitrary. Worse,
it introduces unacceptable latency between the conception of business
questions and the ability to provide the answers. The latency is
unacceptable because the motivation to act on the answer dissipates
during the waiting period.
Add to this the growth in business transaction volumes due to online
commerce and other factors, and the technology is introducing too much
friction. In Plattner’s narrative, disk latency and the separation of
OLTP (OnLine Transactional Processing) and OLAP (OnLine Analytical
Processing) are smothering business, and business decisions. They both
need to be abolished, and the launch of SAP Business Suite on HANA
brings about that abolition. Big Data for big companies Plattner says SAP
thinks business and business analytics both need to run in real time.
The subtext is that this shouldn’t be true only for startups and
Internet businesses but for the old economy, industrial companies that
are SAP’s bread and butter. Hasso spoke from Frankfurt but the action
soon shifted to the stage in New York, where SAP’s Head of Sales Rob Enslin was speaking with Derek Dyer, Director of Global SAP Services at Deere and Company (a.k.a. John Deere).
Dyer spoke glowingly of SAP on HANA and explained the company was at
times impatient in its desire for the Biz Suite/HANA combination to be
readied. In SAP’s press release, Dyer describes the combination as “a
game-changer for John Deere” and further explains that the company is
standardizing on HANA as a platform for a number of future applications.
When a 175-year old manufacturer of heavy machinery gushes about
in-memory databases and Big Data analytics, you know they’re both going
mainstream. Self-reliance
While SAP was already in the
database business with its acquisition of Sybase, running its Business
Suite on its own database is the company’s own real game-changer. SAP
implementations today run on the major relational databases (Microsoft’s SQL Server, Oracle and IBM’s DB2).
And while SAP was careful to point out that the new bits will continue
to run on those platforms, HANA gives SAP the ability to own the entire
software stack above the operating system layer.
So in one fell swoop, putting Business Suite on HANA gives SAP a big
competitive edge in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) world, a
major presence in the Enterprise analytics world, and greater control of
its own destiny. Not bad for a company that many were dismissing as a
dinosaur just a few years ago. Will customers get the religion? Plattner said
that in some tests, SAP on HANA was 250,000 times faster than on
conventional relational databases. What remains to be seen, though, is
whether a significant number of SAP customers feel they need their ERP
thusly accelerated and are willing to pay for the privilege. There is
only so much memory that can go on a given server, after all. And
scaling out the kind of iron that runs HANA is a bit different from
adding a few more blades with commodity disk drives to a Hadoop cluster.
Summary: The German Enterprise software behemoth brings its core applications to its HANA in-memory database.
Source of the data breach appears to be the country's National Revenue Agency A mysterious hacker has stolen the personal details of millions of Bulgarians and has emailed download links to the stolen data to local news publications. The data's origin is believed to be the country's National Revenue Agency (NRA), a department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance. In a message posted on its website on Monday, the NRA said it was working with the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to investigate the hack. "We are currently verifying whether the data is real," said the NRA. Hours after this article's publication, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior confirmed the hack . HACKER STOLE 110 DATABASES, LEAKED 57 According to reports from local media [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ], who received part of the data, the hacker said they stole the personal details of over five million Bulgarians, of the country's total populatio
It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux. Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list . Today it finally happened: All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux . The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list . Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. When the first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993 , Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its masc
Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into t
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