Paul Gillin
Latest from Paul Gillin
How machine learning will spark a revolution in insurance
Siddhartha Dalal got his introduction to probabilistic analysis in the wake of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Dalal’s research on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences found that NASA’s estimates of a 0.5 percent risk of the o-ring gasket failure that caused the explosion was dramatically off-target. At the 31-degree Fahrenheit air temperature ...
Startup Edgewise Networks takes security to the application level
Edgewise Networks has emerged from stealth mode with an approach to network security that is says fixes the biggest problem in firewalls: their reliance on IP addresses, the basic identifier for computing devices. Edgewise’s approach instead works at the application layer, allowing only trusted applications to communicate over approved network paths. The company said its ...
DEEP DIVE
Chief data officers bust out of the shadows onto the corporate front lines
Chief data officers are rapidly moving out of the shadows of back-office data quality and governance tasks and onto the front lines of corporate enterprise computing strategy. That became more obvious Thursday with the release of new Gartner Inc. research as well as stories shared by CDOs at the annual MIT Chief Data Officer and Information ...
Microsoft says its Azure Stack on-premises cloud is finally ready to ship
More than two years after it was announced, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Stack is ready to ship. Microsoft has called the on-premises version of its cloud stack its secret weapon against Amazon Web Services Inc. because it leverages Microsoft’s legacy data center customer base in a distinctive way. Azure Stack is essentially Microsoft’s cloud in a ...
DEEP DIVE
Moving to the cloud is way harder than it looks. Here’s how five pioneers did it
When Salesforce.com Inc. sent Domtar Corp.’s Personal Care Division, a manufacturer of absorbent hygiene products, a request to upgrade software drivers that the customer relationship management supplier was using for connectivity, the process seemed like a simple one. But upon upgrading, Domtar suddenly found that it was no longer able to transfer data from Salesforce ...
Comparison shopping for data centers? There’s an app for that
Few people have much experience setting up a data center, which means that the first time they do it, the process is often tortuous and fraught with error. There are so many moving parts. Space needs to be purchased or leased, equipment provisioned, and networking and peering services set up. Each company’s needs are unique, ...
Tibco colors in the edges with acquisition of microservices developer
Data integration giant Tibco Software Inc. is boosting its edge computing strategy with the acquisition of Nanoscale Inc., a provider of productivity tools for creating microservices, small pieces of software code that can be combined into various applications. Pricing wasn’t disclosed. Tibco said the Reston, Virginia-based company’s technology will help it extend its Connected Intelligence data consolidation and analytics platform ...
Syncsort changes hands again in acquisition/merger deal
Less than two years after selling out to Clearlake Capital Group L.P. and ending its 47-year run as an independent company, Syncsort Inc. is being sold again. Private equity firm Centerbridge Partners L.P. said it will acquire the big data and mainframe software firm along with Vision Solutions Inc., a maker of business resilience software, ...
Wikibon report questions ‘breakthrough technology’ claims for 3D Xpoint memory chips
Ears must be burning at chip giants Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. in the wake of a new report by Wikibon Chief Technology Officer David Floyer (pictured) that dismantles the grandiose claims the two companies have been making about their jointly developed 3D XPoint memory chip technology. 3D XPoint was announced nearly two years ...
AppDynamics takes aim at software container performance with Docker monitor
Asserting that slow performance is a major barrier to the acceptance of applications that can run in software containers, AppDynamics Inc. is rolling out a service to monitor Docker Inc. containers running microservices. Microservices iQ Integrated Docker Monitoring enables administrators to view container metadata plus resource indicators for single containers of clusters of containers in ...
