Just like Google MapReduce inspired Apache to come with Hadoop opensource project, Google Dremel paper has inspired MapR and Apache to add their new project Drill to Apache Incubator. Drill is a distributed system for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. With a design goal to scale to 10,000 servers or more and process petabytes of data in seconds its being designed to efficiently process nested data.

ERP for a small business can always be an issue in particular when you may have to use heavy software like SAP, NetSuite and others. Well if you are a small or a medium business you may want to give a it a shot with one of the new startup ERP solution BizSlate. BizSlate is a new startup ERP Software-as-a-Service launched for the benefit of small and medium businesses that would like simplicity and host of features to use with minimal compromise.

Customer management itself is a task that is difficult to master, specifically when you are a small business and does not have enough resources or time at your disposal. One company that offers a suite of integrated applications to drive more sales and better service and satisfaction is ZOHO. ZOHO has now equipped business with campaign management software ZOHO Campaigns to reach and engage customers and prospects wherever they are — in email, Twitter, Facebook and more.

One of the interesting stories of 2011 has been launch of Boundary, a big data collection, streaming, and real-time analytics system for processing high-dimensionality sensor network data. Offering monitoring as a service and a platform, Boundary has announced general availability of its new monitoring approach in March, 2012.

High availability and manageability were the biggest issues when Hadoop came into existence, however they seem to be the issues of the past with most of the cloud vendors designing their infrastructure to provide alternate clusters and servers to overcome such issues. Hadoop itself has announced next version of map-reduce as alpha version of Hadoop 2.0 providing solutions to such issues.

Everyone hates software bugs - developers hate them in their code and consumers hate them in their products. Typemock, an Israel based unit testing product developer for various development platforms has provided some interesting facts about software bugs as an infographic. 

We had been covering a bit about Telerik Test Studio in the recent past including a quick review done by one of my colleague. We liked the product and thought to catch up with Test Studio team  and know their thoughts on current testing trends and whats being planned further for Test Studio. Here are some insights from "Faris Sweis", Chief Software Architect for Telerik's Testing division.

Gone are the days when Dell was known just for its hardware and laptops. Dell has off late transformed completely into a solution provider teaming up with various technology vendors and acquiring some valuable assets to launch its own Cloud Platform, Big Data solutions and more. This Big Data platform is now further extended beyond big data storage to big data management, analytics and professional services.

Just when i thought the buying spree will end somewhere from Oracle, it seems to have just started this year. Oracle now acquires substantially all of the assets of Skire, a leading provider of capital program management and facilities management applications available on the cloud and on-premise. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and approvals and is expected to close in the second half of 2012.

While SQL to NoSQL move has been a challenge so far, enterprises face further challenges to manage and maintain nosql data store to current demands, specially while nosql is still evolving. We are talking about moving from an established, structured and widely accepted to an evolving, non-relational datastore. Take note of a startup "ScaleGrid" that has come up with an end to end lifecycle management solution for leading nosql database MongoDB called “MongoDirector”.