Billion Dollar Unicorns: Nutanix Gives VMWare Tough Competition

Today, most IT functions of organizations are moving away from siloed service providers to a consolidated services provider. This has led to the evolution of the hyperconverged infrastructure where compute and storage capabilities are integrated so that they can run adjacent to each other on the same physical hardware. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Nutanix is giving bigger vendors a tough fight in this space. >>>

Is Technology Dehumanizing Society?

In my recent trend piece, From Second Silicon Valley Gold Rush to Angel Investment Bubble, These Are the Tech Trends to Watch, I concluded with the following thought:

The Dehumanization of Society: Technology has created tremendous opportunities for the world to shrink through communication, collaboration, and cloud-based productivity tools. But it has created immense opportunities for wasting time. On Facebook. On Twitter. On stupid games. Human beings are losing their ability to communicate in person. To smile at each other. To converse. To enjoy a meal together without looking at their smartphones. To look into each other’s eyes. To touch. To honor food that someone else has cooked with love and care. To be present in the moment without interruption. This is a tremendous loss that cannot be quantified.

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From Second Silicon-Valley Gold Rush to Angel-Investment Bubble, These Are the Tech Trends to Watch

The technology industry is the most exciting phenomenon in America today, other than, perhaps, the prospect of energy independence. The latter, however, doesn’t get the same kind of glamorous coverage from the media that our personalities get. In particular, technology entrepreneurs have led us into an age of nerd-celebrities that dominate the psyche of the young and ambitious. A recent profile of Marc Andreessen in the New Yorker exemplifies this dynamic. The tech industry has officially captured the imagination of the public, and Hollywood is rolling out movies to feed this frenzy.

Against this backdrop, there are a number of trends to watch: >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Hortonworks Needs To Deliver Results

A Markets and Markets report on Hadoop estimates the total Hadoop market to grow 55% annually to be worth $13.95 billion by 2017. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Hortonworks is one successful player in this rapidly growing Hadoop market.

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Amazon Finally Reveals its Cloud Financials

Lately, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) has started revealing more financial details about their business segments. Last quarter, they spoke about Prime and this quarter, they shared a peek into the world of their cloud business. And, the market is pleased with what they saw. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 4)

Tony Paine: When you think of the oil and gas market where you have remote sites that are perhaps drilling wells, that information has been historically self-contained on the site and requires someone to be out there to take measurements. The thought is, that is not realistic going forward. The industry doesn’t have the same amount of experts for the same amount of remote sites. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 3)

Tony Paine: What we are seeing now is there is a big push to Internet-enable these systems so that people can get visibility into what’s going on at multiple, remote sites and pull it into a central location and to be able to make intelligent decisions based on it. Kepware is starting to get pulled into this new space called the Internet of Things (IoT). I say it’s a new space. A lot of the stuff that we’ve been doing for the 20 years is exactly what’s required to build out an IoT solution. It’s the ability to go and recognize that there are multiple data sources that contain valuable information. However, the way that they expose that information may vary. It may vary in the actual communications medium. It could be wireless, Bluetooth, Ethernet, or a number of other things. >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what you think about industry movements, trends, and open problems.

Torben Nielsen: One of the things that I see as a major opportunity is that we, as a company, work very closely with health plans in providing that shopping experience. You can see treatment cost. You can see your benefit levels and out-of-pocket cost. One of the most fundamental things of an e-commerce site is that there’s a transaction. There’s instant gratification. We are just starting to move into that direction where you can actually purchase and say, “Based on these prices, I want this treatment at this hospital.”

If there’s a way to actually purchase that service at that price point and then embed the hospital delivery system into that overall experience, then you become much more e-commerce like and you start rounding out the overall shopping experience. It actually becomes a transactional >>>