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4 forces changing the face of business intelligence Summary:   Are we still viewing 21st century organizations through a 1990s window? These are four of the major trends reshaping business intelligence and analytics this year, the subject of a   webcast   I just delivered as part of my work with Unisphere Research/Information Today Inc. (The webcast was sponsored by Tableau Software.)   (Image: Joe McKendrick/ZDNet) In looking at the coming revolution in BI and analytics, the question that needs to be asked is: "Are we still viewing 21st century organizations through a 1990s window?"Analytics guru Tom Davenport, for one, still believes that we still are caught in the 1990s, so to speak,   with analytics still in the domain of the quants and statisticians. Plus, the BI interfaces decision makers still use are two-dimensional charts — and even simple spreadsheets.Here are the four trends shaking up BI as we've known it: Visual analytics Some also refer

Microsoft's latest pitch to business: Make Windows Azure 'your datacenter' Summary:   Microsoft is honing its public-cloud pitch, appealing to enterprise users, just ahead of its annual management conference. Next week is Microsoft's annual   Microsoft Management Summit conference in Las Vegas . No, I won't be there (me and Las Vegas -- we're not friends). But I have been combing through   the session list   for the event, which runs from April 8 to April 12. In case you don't already know about MMS, this isn't a show for tech wimps. It's for IT managers who love things like System Center Configuration Manager Service Pack 1 and User State Migration Tookit 5.0. But it's also a place where some of Microsoft's higher-level messaging around Windows Server, System Center and Windows Azure occasionally bubble up. Two of the sessions from the online MMS catalog piqued my interest because of their focus on getting enterprise users

Java-based attacks remain at large, researchers say Summary:   Just how are Java attacks getting through? A new Websense report suggests that approximately 94 percent of endpoints which run Oracle's Java are vulnerable to at least one exploit, and we are ignoring updates at our own peril.  According to security researchers   at Websense , it's not just zero-day attacks which remain a persistent threat. Instead, Java exploits are now a popular tool for cybercriminals. With so many vulnerabilities, keeping browsers up-to-date can become an issue — especially as Java has to be updated independently from our preferred browser, and a mobile, cross-browser workforce is difficult to manage securely. Keeping this in mind, the security team used their Advanced Classification Engine (ACE) and ThreatSeeker Network to both detect and analyze in real-time which versions of Java are currently in use across "tens of millions" of endpoints. The researchers found that t

Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer integration Summary:   Microsoft is providing more dates and details about how it is integrating its Yammer enterprise social-networking technology with Office 365. On March 19, day one of Microsoft's annual Convergence conference, company officials shed more light on how Yammer's enterprise social-networking technology will be integrated into Office 365 and SharePoint in the coming year-plus. Microsoft officials originally shared   a roadmap regarding this integration in November 2012. But today, officials provided more dates and more details around the integration of Yammer feeds into SharePoint. Last fall, Microsoft officials said in the "immediate future" Yammer and SharePoint would be unified via a single ID/sign-on, shared document-management capabilties and feed aggregation. In the longer term, the Softies said, the two would be integrated from an email, IM and video-conferencing perspective. Here's what we

LinkedIn buying news reader app Pulse for more than $50 million Summary:   If a new report is true, LinkedIn is making a serious play at digital publishing through a new acquisition. LinkedIn   is reportedly working out a deal to purchase the popular news reader mobile app,   Pulse . AllThingsD   reported on Monday , based on word from "sources familiar with the negotiations," the professional social network is paying anywhere between $50 million and $100 million for the San Francisco-based digital publisher.However, neither company has revealed anything publicly yet. But if it turns out to be true, it marks a major move into digital publishing for LinkedIn.The Mountain View, Calif.-based social media giant has already been plugging away at promoting itself as a news aggregate at least -- especially through its mobile apps and a major revamp of its   news feed and profile pages. The acquisition of Pulse would likely play into strengthening that constant str

Five ways to save Windows 8 Summary:   Windows 8, like Vista before it, is on its way to the trash heap of PC history unless Microsoft makes some big changes as soon as possible. Can the Windows 8 operating system be saved? In all seriousness, Microsoft should be asking itself this question. If Microsoft radically reworks Windows 8, this doesn't have to be its fate.   (Image: Screenshot by Steven J Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNet) The numbers don't lie.   Windows 8's market acceptance is continuing to fall behind Microsoft's last desktop operating system failure, Vista.   Asus, which had been a big Windows 8 booster, is now reporting poor sales   and Samsung has decided not to bother with launching a Windows 8 tablet in the lucrative German market. Simply chopping prices drastically for Windows 8 and Office 2013 for mini-tablets   isn't going to cut it. Neither Windows 8 nor its close relatives, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8, even appear on NetApplicatio