Data is driving novel money-making methods across business departments, particularly the numbers-driven marketing and sales divisions. Riding shotgun are new accountability standards for payrollers in these respective fiefs. When the boss puts data in one hand, he or she strips excuses from the other — and the results can be sweet. Historically, marketers could slide by the ...

Is data the new oil? Is data the most valuable asset a modern enterprise possesses? Is it the new currency? Most enterprises would answer, “Yes,” to all of the above. But do they actually know where all their data is? Many would say, “Nope.” So how can they take the crucial step to data-driven business ...

Whenever anyone starts a conversation about using data as a business asset, it tends to conclude with this consensus: ‘We’re not there yet.’ Companies living the dream aren’t very many, but their ranks are slowly growing, and their successes can serve as pointers for the rest of us. Some of the industry’s most inquisitive minds gathered today ...

The Ethereum blockchain protocol, bousted with protections from fraud and third-party interference, is the hottest thing in cryptocurrency. Transactions on the decentralized platform for running and programming software applications now triple the number of rival bitcoin transactions, according to data by Bitinfocharts. Other blockchain protocols are cropping up, and they may supplant traditional applications as the major ...

The inexorable march toward the cloud shows no signs of slowing. That’s why vendors of all stripes want to be No. 1, whether it’s in basic cloud infrastructure or specialized cloud services. The big question: Can old hands such as Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. pull ahead of Amazon Web Services Inc. with their enterprise footholds? ...

Are enterprise business applications good for more than garbage in, garbage out tab keeping? Some innovative vendors are kicking enterprise software up a notch with artificial intelligence technology. The new class of apps delivers a humanized, conversational experience and even makes smart suggestions to users. “I don’t think anyone is thrilled to come to work ...

Containers’ technology for running distributed software applications is off-the-grill hot, and that means they’re still a bit too hot to handle for some. Orchestration and storage snafus, for instance, can pop up when users run large numbers of containers in production. An ecosystem within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is developing to sand down the ...

How does a small startup butt its green horns with dominant cloud bulls Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform? DigitalOcean LLC is making headway by winning over developers and hand selecting must-have features for modern application creation. It’s proving to be fertile ground for the company, getting them in at companies that were this close to ...

The serverless computing scene isn’t famous for its love of rules and regulations. The open-source communities and developers that fuel it might not even agree on how to define serverless computing, and may embrace the chaos and the freedom it grants. But enterprise folks care less about being cool and more about their getting jobs done. ...

Amazon Web Services Inc. became head honcho in public cloud by tuning out competition and turning up customer voices. Its catalog of services is arguably overwhelming now, but the company insists it simply doesn’t want to leave any customer needs unmet. This is why it plans on bringing out more much-in-demand machine learning and analytics ...