Big Data News over the last week

The last week was really busy with the SIGMOD 2013 Deadline, and I did not get to posting that much, so I will catch up over the weekend.

Dell acquires Gale Technologies, a company that automates and manages physical and virtual resources. They provide templated provisioning and management through their GaleForce platform, which provides automation, self-service, and resource scheduling; they manage everything from compute, network, storage, and cloud resources (they include amazon and rackspace), and edge devices. This space is hot since Cisco also recently announced that they would acquire Cloupia which has similar capabilities: A resource lifecycle manager, an operations automation center, a capacity manager, etc. Management of resources and automation of in-house, cloud, and hybrid deployments is one of those boring "enterprise" tasks that one hears little about in the press, but that is crucially important in the enterprise.

Interesting speculations about Steve Sinofsky, including amazon and Tableau as companies located in Seattle.

A nice sampling of Big Data and Enterprise Security. This reminds me of the first paper that I read in this space when I was still a graduate student and just starting in data mining: Wenke Lee, Salvatore J. Stolfo, Kui W. Mok: Mining Audit Data to Build Intrusion Detection Models. KDD 1998: 66-72. It contained an early version of item constraints which they called axis attributes and also a heuristic algorithm for finding patterns with low support.

The amount of storage used in Microsoft's SkyDrive has doubled over the last six months. They also announced selective sync. This comes at the same time as Dropbox is running its space race for universities (Cornell is currently Number 4!) with the goal to sign up (and lock in) students. But Dropbox is also innovating fast, having just announced Dropbox Chooser, an easy way to integrate Dropbox into web apps with a small piece of JavaScript.