Tech News

  • MSDSonline and KMI Are Now VelocityEHS

    CHICAGO, Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MSDSonline, the leading cloud environmental, health and safety (EHS) solutions provider, and its wholly-owned subsidiary Knowledge Management Innovations (KMI), one of the most respected global EHS and sustainability management information system (EMIS) providers, announced today that they will begin doing business as VelocityEHS. The new brand and identity reflect the company's focus on a simpler approach to EHS, sustainability and risk management with an easy to use platform solution. Headquartered in Chicago, VelocityEHS also has offices in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

    With more than 10,000 customers, VelocityEHS makes its debut as a well-established leader, and one of the industry's largest and fastest growing EHS and sustainability software providers. Its suite of solutions enables organizations to create safer, more sustainable workplaces by helping them better identify and manage their environment, health, safety, and operational risks.

    "When our two companies joined forces last August, we greatly increased both the breadth of our tools and the scope of the capabilities to solve our customers' broader EHS needs," said Glenn Trout, president and CEO of VelocityEHS.

    "Our goal is to deliver the most relevant cloud EHS capabilities through an easily accessible platform, which is more affordable, quicker and easier to implement, and provides the simplest user experience for our clients. Telling that story is the main reason behind our new name and brand. We believe VelocityEHS better communicates the kind of EHS software solutions our customers want," Trout said.

    According to user research, businesses – especially large enterprises – are moving away from solutions that solve niche problems and are looking for single-point software that solves an array of complex EHS challenges. 

    "We're listening to our customers," said Trout. "They're telling us that too many of the options today are slow to implement and cumbersome for their people to use. Our focus is on delivering a platform that is simple and intuitive and will help customers drive their EHS goals through quick implementation and organization-wide user engagement in order to mitigate risk and accelerate sustainability at all levels of their organization."

    The VelocityEHS approach provides EHS professionals with a single solution for managing a wide range of EHS process, reporting and compliance tasks, including: incident management, audits and inspections, compliance management, corrective actions, management of change, chemical management, risk analysis, EHS training and training tracking. It can be implemented across an organization in as little as 4-6 weeks to more quickly drive performance at every level of the enterprise. The solution is backed by a customer success team that is widely recognized for delivering unparalleled customer support, earning among the highest renewal and customer satisfaction rates in the industry.

    Trout said, "While our name is changing, what won't change is our commitment to creating partnerships with our customers. We will continue to guide them with expert advice, not just through implementation, but throughout their entire EHS and sustainability journey. And we'll also continue to develop products and services, based on the unique challenges our customers face as well as the best practices of the EHS and sustainability industry overall."

    Beginning today, MSDSonline and KMI are doing business as VelocityEHS, and over the next few months the company will phase in its new identity across its offices, products and services. 

    The company plans to retain the MSDSonline name and begin using it as a product brand for its chemical management capabilities under the VelocityEHS umbrella. The MSDSonline brand will continue to deliver easy-to-use, cloud solutions to help businesses simplify chemical and safety data sheet management to meet global Hazard Communication requirements.

    For more information, visit www.velocityEHS.com.  

    About VelocityEHS

    As the largest dedicated EHS software solutions provider in the market, more than 8 million users worldwide from virtually every industry trust VelocityEHS and its solutions to improve EHS performance. Its unparalleled customer support and easily accessible platform delivers relevant cloud solutions that help customers reach their EHS, sustainability and risk management goals faster. The company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois with locations in Canada, the UK and Australia. For more information, visit www.velocityEHS.com. VelocityEHS is an Actua (Nasdaq:ACTA) company.

    CONTACT: Media Contacts VelocityEHS/MSDSonline Betsy Utley-Marin 312.881.2307 butleymarin@MSDSonline.com Actua Corporation Karen Greene 610.727.6900 media@actua.com

  • Kivuto Solutions' Interactive Microsoft Tribute Wins Best in Show at The 2015 W(3) Awards

    OTTAWA, Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kivuto Solutions, the global leader in complex digital distribution solutions, is honoured to have won Best in Show (Website Features - Visual Appeal) at The 2015 W³ Awards for the interactive Microsoft tribute "Evolution of Windows". Fellow honourees for Best in Show include Google, HBO, and Sony.

    Celebrating the release of Windows 10, "Evolution of Windows", featured by TheNextWeb, is a sleek, informative, and funny timeline that takes you from Windows 1.0 in 1985 to Windows 10 in 2015. Playing with your mouse animates each version of Windows in exciting ways, from launching a game to revealing the dreaded "blue screen of death".

    The W³ Awards recognizes innovation in websites, apps, online and social media marketing. By winning Best in Show as well as Silver (Website Features - User Experience), Kivuto's "Evolution of Windows" brings the company's total W³ Awards tally to seven trophies. Kivuto works closely with Microsoft worldwide to provide academic software discounts for students and educators.

    "With the release of Windows 10, our team wanted to build something special to celebrate the story of Windows and our partnership with Microsoft," says Gustavo Sanchez, Director of Marketing at Kivuto. "It was a unique creative piece and we couldn't be prouder to have international recognition for our success."

    About Kivuto

    Kivuto Solutions is the world's leading provider of advanced digital distribution and management solutions that enable the secure delivery of digital goods to individuals, businesses, and organizations anywhere in the world. Kivuto simplifies the process of delivering any digital good to any market under virtually any terms and conditions. Over 60,000 academic institutions and departments trust Kivuto to manage and distribute software to their students, faculty and staff. The company distributes software in 195 countries and supports 14 languages. www.kivuto.com.

    CONTACT: Katie Hulan Marketing Manager, Marketing Services T +1 613.526.3005 x 125 M +1 613.355.3649 F +1 613.526.3891

  • Study Finds Sales and Marketing Wasting 50% of Time and Money on Leads

    FOSTER CITY, Calif., Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Corporate sales and marketing executives agree that at least 50% of their sales effort and 50% of their lead generation budget is wasted on leads that are never contacted, according to a survey at Dreamforce by Conversica, the leading provider of lead engagement software for marketing, inside sales and sales.

    The most significant reasons identified by sales were poor quality leads (37%) and leads that were too hard to reach (41%). On the other side of the divide, well over a third of marketers surveyed (39%) feel that, despite the large investment in time by sales, only a quarter of their leads are being followed up. Asked why, 30% of marketers said that not enough attempts are being made to reach those leads, or salespeople aren't reaching out soon enough. As a result, half the marketing respondents feel their lead generation budget is being wasted.

    "These are disappointing statistics," indicated Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica. "Despite all the emphasis being placed on sales+marketing alignment today, that alignment obviously remains elusive and frustrating. Our survey found, as we suspected, that lead engagement is clearly at the heart of the problem."

    Conversica presented a session entitled, "Smarketing: The New Sales-Marketing Alignment Driven by Artificial Intelligence" at the Dreamforce Partner Theater. It offered best practices for companies to get past the traditional finger pointing over lead quality and close the gap between sales and marketing teams, to increase sales efficiency and to drive more qualified leads. A recorded version is available at http://con.ai/df15-smarketing-video.

    The study certainly supported the need for "Smarketing," finding that the vast majority of sales (80%) and marketing (70%) executives agree their teams were still not well aligned—with one in five saying they were "poorly" aligned.  Leads are indeed the culprit with nearly half of the sales (43%) and marketing (46%) executives indicating they were "extremely" important in terms of creating alignment.
     
    Asked how they expected to solve this problem, both factions (80%) said investing in sales or marketing automation tools was their highest priority for improving lead engagement.
     
    "While it's nice to see the two departments trying to agree on a solution, pure automation is not the answer to improving marketing's ROI and helping sales reach more leads," concludes Terry, whose company provides virtual sales assistants that ensure every single lead is contacted.  "It's just going to increase the frustration. If sales are going to reach more leads, they need more than assistance, they need assistants. That's where we come in."
     
    About Conversica
     
    Conversica is the leading provider of lead engagement software for marketing, inside sales and sales organizations. Driven by artificial intelligence technology, Conversica's custom online persona automatically contacts, engages, nurtures, qualifies and follows up with leads via natural, two-way email conversations until the lead converts into an opportunity or opts out. The virtual sales assistant interprets the lead's intention and sentiment in email replies and extracts key information, such as phone numbers and the best time to call. As a result, our customers find their next customers more quickly and efficiently, while ensuring no lead is left behind.

    Used by more than 8,000 sales representatives worldwide, Conversica maximizes sales opportunities by optimizing sales team productivity and has helped create more than US$8 billion in sales revenue. Conversica is a portfolio company of Kennet Partners and is headquartered in Foster City, California.

    To learn more, visit www.conversica.com and follow us on Google+, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

    CONTACT: Gary Thompson Clarity Communications +1-925-768-2400 gthompson@claritycommunications.us

  • AppliedMicro and Vapor IO Partner to Deliver New Data Center Telemetry With the Vapor Edge Controller

    SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (Nasdaq:AMCC), a global leader in computing and connectivity solutions, today announced a partnership with Vapor IO, provider of the world's first intelligent, hyper modular data center solution. With this partnership, AppliedMicro's HeliX®2 quad-core integrated 64-bit ARM processor will power Vapor IO's Vapor Edge Controller™ (VEC), an Edge Zone Controller superseding traditional "top-of-rack" controllers by managing a dense physical and logical compute zone within the data center.

    "We chose AppliedMicro's HeliX 2 because it delivers the unique capabilities required by modern data centers," said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO. The high performance combined with low power consumption, small form factor, support for ARM 64-bit instruction set architecture and an integrated 64-bit memory controller are key features that we have leveraged to enable users to monitor and manage data center components like never before. We look forward to the impact this new technology will have on the data center market."

    "With IT organizations continuously seeking to enhance data center management capabilities and lower costs, the Vapor Edge Controller represents a major step forward," said John Williams, vice president of marketing for AppliedMicro. "Vapor IO has taken advantage of the performance of the HeliX 2 processor to replace a large number of BMC devices within a rack with a disaggregated solution, reducing cost and complexity while increasing overall reliability and telemetry."

    The Vapor Edge Controller manages data centers with rack-level granularity, replacing proprietary baseboard management controllers on each server, while also reducing costs, regardless of rack or server type. The Vapor Edge Controller ties all components together and provides simple management tools at a lower price point. Powering the VEC is the quad-core HeliX 2 which runs up to 2 GHz, integrating multiple high speed interfaces and hardware accelerators, including six lanes of PCIe 3.0, one lane of SATA 3.0, three USB 3.0 ports and a memory controller.

    About Vapor IO

    Vapor IO provides the industry's first intelligent, hyper modular data center solution. Significantly lowering capex and opex costs when building and running data driven data centers, Vapor IO provides an integrated solution to integration problems. Eliminating complex structures and parking lot data centers, Vapor IO offers a true intelligence platform for any data center workload. For additional information, please visit www.vapor.io.

    About AppliedMicro

    Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (NASDAQ:AMCC) is a global leader in computing and connectivity solutions for next-generation cloud infrastructure and data centers. AppliedMicro delivers silicon solutions that dramatically lower total cost of ownership. Corporate headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, California. www.apm.com.

    (C) Copyright 2015. Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, AppliedMicro, X-Gene, X-Weave, Server on a Chip, and Cloud Server are trademarks or registered trademarks of Applied Micro Circuits Corporation. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.

    CONTACT: Media Contacts: Mike Major Applied Micro Circuits Corporation Phone: (408) 542-8831 mmajor@apm.com Jennifer Grabowski Racepoint Global for Applied Micro Circuits Corporation Phone: (617) 624-3231 APM@racepointglobal.com Heather Fitzsimmons Mindshare PR for Vapor IO Phone: (650) 279-4360 heather@mindsharepr.com

  • Clarity Recipient of Marcum Tech Top 40 Award

    Madison, CT, Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Connecticut Technology Council (CTC) and Marcum LLP recently announced Clarity Software Solutions, Inc. made the 2015 Marcum Tech Top 40  list of the fastest growing technology companies in Connecticut for the third consecutive year. Clarity was honored at an awards ceremony held at the Wallingford Theater on September 24.

    The Marcum Tech Top 40, now in its eighth year, recognizes technology leaders in six industry sectors, including Advanced Manufacturing, Energy/Environmental, Life Sciences, New Media/Internet/Telecom, IT Services, and Software. Clarity has been named a Tech Top 40 company in the Software category. Clarity is a recipient of this award due to strong revenue growth of at least $3 million in annual revenue as well as growth in each of the preceding four years.

    Sean Rotermund, President & CEO, Clarity Software Solutions stated, “Being recognized with this group of successful, Connecticut based companies is something we’re extremely proud of. To be honored with this recognition for three consecutive years is a testament to the hard work and dedication of everyone here at Clarity.”

    “The annual Marcum Tech Top 40 is a showcase for the exceptional ingenuity and drive of Connecticut’s fastest growing technology companies,” said Anthony P. Scillia, Partner-in-Charge, Marcum New England. “Marcum is extremely proud to partner with the Connecticut Technology Council on this outstanding program each year, and we extend our most enthusiastic congratulations to all the winners.”

    “The 2015 Marcum Tech Top 40 winners have all achieved significant success managing a multitude of operational challenges including capital-raising, complex revenue reporting, intellectual property protection and international expansion.  Whether they are private enterprises or Fortune 500 companies, they all provide a model for others aspiring to their achievements,” said Michael K. Brooder, Partner-in-Charge of Marcum’s Hartford office and a member of the Firm’s Technology Practice group.

    Bruce Carlson, CTC’s President & CEO, added, “It is exciting to see that we have fast growing companies across multiple technology verticals in Connecticut. This speaks to the management and creativity of the companies as well as the high quality of their workforces. The fact that we see a mix of returning companies and new entrants every year tells us that Connecticut remains a place where technology companies can start, grow and thrive.”

    This year’s event sponsors include: title sponsor Marcum LLP, Geomatrix Productions, Pullman & Comley LLC, Webster Bank, Capital One Bank, The Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Comcast Business, Frontier Communications, HB Live, UK Trade & Investment, Business New Haven, The Fairfield County Business Journal and The Hartford Business Journal.

    About The Connecticut Technology Council

    The Connecticut Technology Council is a statewide association of technology oriented companies and institutions, providing leadership in areas of policy advocacy, community building and assistance for growing companies. Speaking for 2,500 companies that employ some 200,000 residents, the Connecticut Technology Council seeks to provide a strong and urgent voice in support of the creation of a culture of innovation. This includes working to position Connecticut as a leader in idea creation, workforce preparation, entrepreneurial aptitude, early stage risk capital availability and providing on-going support and mentoring to high potential firms. For more information, visit www.ct.org.

    About Marcum LLP

    Marcum LLP is one of the largest independent public accounting and advisory services firms in the United States.  Headquartered in New York City, Marcum LLP offers the resources of 1,300 professionals, including more than 160 partners, in 23 full-service offices in major business markets throughout the U.S., Grand Cayman and China. Marcum is a member of the Marcum Group, an organization providing a comprehensive range of professional services spanning accounting and advisory, technology solutions, wealth management, and executive and professional recruiting. The Marcum Group companies include Marcum LLP, Marcum Technology LLC, Marcum Search LLC, Marcum Staffing LLC, Marcum Financial Services LLC, Marcum Bernstein & Pinchuk LLP and MarcumBuchanan Associates LLC. For more information, visit www.marcumllp.com.

    About Clarity Software Solutions, Inc.

    Clarity Software Solutions, Inc. assists clients to optimize customer relationships by enhancing flexibility and control over their document management and communications delivery. Clarity is headquartered in Madison, Connecticut, and serves various industries around the country. Clarity’s custom solutions are built within secure web-based technology, are easy to use and allow a single communication to be published to any media type - print, web, mobile, or email. For more information, please visit clarityssi.com.

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    CONTACT: Media Contacts:April BeginClarity Software Solutions, Inc.abegin@clarityssi.com(203) 453-3999 ext. 501Michael ScriccaConnecticut Technology Councilmscricca@ct.org(860) 289-0878 ext. 334Julie Gross Gelfand, APRMarcum LLPJulie.grossgelfand@marcumllp.comO (631) 414-4302M (516) 729-8067

  • Cloudera Launches Kudu, New Hadoop Storage for Fast Analytics on Fast Data

    PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, announced today the public beta release of Kudu, a revolutionary new columnar store for Hadoop that enables the powerful combination of fast analytics on fast data. Complementing the existing Hadoop storage options, HDFS and Apache HBase, Kudu is the first native Hadoop storage engine that supports both low-latency random access and high-throughput analytics, dramatically simplifying Hadoop architectures for increasingly common real-time use cases. A public beta of Kudu is immediately available under the Apache open source license, and will be transitioned to the Apache Software Foundation incubator in the future.

    Until now, developers have been forced to make a choice between fast analytics with HDFS or efficient updates with HBase. Especially with the rise of streaming data, there has been a growing demand for combining the two features to build real-time analytic applications on changing data - leading developers to create complex architectures with the storage options available. Kudu complements the capabilities of HDFS and HBase, providing simultaneous fast inserts and updates and efficient columnar scans. This powerful combination enables real-time analytic workloads with a single storage layer, eliminating the need for complex architectures.

    "We've been making Hadoop better since the very beginning," said Charles Zedlewski, vice president, products, Cloudera. "We have an ambitious mission: to constantly drive innovation within the community to usher in the next generation of analytics supported by Hadoop, so companies can adapt to the latest technologies. Cloudera has already transformed what's possible with Hadoop -- enabling interactive data discovery and analytics with Impala and flexible data processing and streaming with Apache Spark. Kudu continues this trend by revolutionizing Hadoop's storage architecture to better support development of real-time analytic applications, and serves as a crucial step towards solidifying Hadoop as the leading platform for modern analytics."

    Kudu's architecture streamlines the developer experience for building analytic applications - supporting common use cases that include time series analysis, machine data analytics, and online reporting. Additionally, Kudu is designed to take advantage of changing trends in hardware and in-memory processing. It delivers outstanding CPU performance, takes advantage of RAM and flash, and drives high I/O efficiency as a true columnar store. Finally, as a native, open component within Hadoop, Kudu is integrated with and provides faster query performance for the most powerful analytic frameworks. Users already rely upon many of them, including Impala and Spark - for end-to-end analytic applications in a single platform.

    Kudu was jointly engineered by Cloudera and Intel in advance of the changing hardware landscape. Intel has actively contributed to Kudu to help it take full advantage of current and future Intel processor and memory technologies. Kudu was designed to use new persistent memory (pmem) innovations being developed through Intel's pmem project.

    "As Hadoop analytics evolve, it's critical that they are designed with next-generation hardware in mind," said Vin Sharma, Intel's Director of Strategy & Products for Big Data Analytics. "Kudu is a critical milestone for Hadoop, supporting the growing need for simplified real-time applications. Intel worked with Cloudera and the community to ensure Kudu is optimized for fast analytic performance today, but is also built to use Intel's platform advancements well into the future, such as Intel DIMMs with 3D XPoint memory."

    As an open source project, Kudu has drawn wide involvement from the community. Xiaomi, one of the largest smartphone developers in the world, has been one of the first beta users of Kudu and actively contributes to the project. Other organizations, including AtScale, Splice Machine and Zoomdata, have also been developing on Kudu.

    "Xiaomi has been a long-time user of and contributor to the Hadoop ecosystem, using it to power a wide range of use cases across our business," said Baoqiu Cui, Chief Architect at Xiaomi. "Our infrastructure team has been working with Cloudera to develop Kudu, taking advantage of its unique ability to support columnar scans and fast inserts and updates to continue to expand our Hadoop ecosystem footprint. Using Kudu, alongside interactive SQL tools like Impala, has allowed us to build a next-generation data analytics platform for real-time analytics and online reporting. We are excited to continue to work with the community to further drive Kudu and the capabilities of Hadoop as a whole."

    "Kudu effectively enables the next generation of analytic architectures, especially for Business Intelligence (BI). With its support for both random and sequential high volume reads and writes, it is the ideal storage system for low-latency, scale-out BI architectures of the kind that AtScale customers demand. As enterprises look to democratize access to data and enable Hadoop to run large-scale, fast analytical workloads, Kudu will play a critical role," says Josh Klahr, VP of Product Management at AtScale. "As a strong proponent of the Apache Hadoop open source ecosystem, AtScale is to be a part of this community effort and is excited to help further develop it for our customers."

    "We are very excited to be part of the Kudu community," said John Leach, co-founder and CTO, Splice Machine. "At Splice Machine, we have developed an ACID compliant RDBMS that runs on Hadoop and are pushing the envelope in terms of running mixed workloads on Hadoop. As a result, we welcome and support innovation in Hadoop's storage architecture. Kudu holds incredible promise in its ability to handle real-time updates combined with long-running analytics. It strengthens the Hadoop ecosystem by providing a scalable, alternate storage engine that complements existing ones."

    "Kudu provides a simplified storage architecture for use cases that are quite common among Zoomdata users," said Justin Langseth, CEO at Zoomdata. "As a native component of Hadoop, Kudu's integration with Impala and Spark make it easy to open up this data using Zoomdata's fast visual analytics solution. We have worked closely with Cloudera and the community to help develop Kudu to meet the needs of our users - supporting the streamlined combination of real-time and analytic applications - and we are excited to continue this effort with the public beta release."

    For organizations to continue to benefit from data-driven insights, Hadoop's architecture has to work at the same, ever-accelerating speed at which data is being created and changed. With Kudu, the Hadoop community ushers in the next generation of Hadoop applications with storage for fast analytics on fast data.

    "In the era of machine-generated data, there's an increasing need to analyze data in human real-time. This is true across a broad range of analytic use cases, from monitoring and business intelligence to predictive modeling and recommendation," said Curt Monash, president, Monash Research. "Kudu, Spark and the rest of the Hadoop stack are a promising approach toward eventually meeting those needs."

    Resources

    Start Contributing - [http://getkudu.io/contributing.html]

    Download the Public Beta or Try the VM - [www.cloudera.com/downloads]

    Technical Whitepaper - [getkudu.io/kudu.pdf]

    ###

    This information is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. Cloudera does not guarantee that the beta software will be made generally available or that any individual feature in the beta version will be made generally available. Cloudera may make the beta software generally available, or not, in its sole discretion and without obligation to make any communication of any kind with regard to such availability.

    About Cloudera

    Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified Platform for big data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, access, process, secure, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data. Cloudera's open source big data platform is the most widely adopted in the world, and Cloudera is the most prolific contributor to the open source Hadoop ecosystem. As the leading educator of Hadoop professionals, Cloudera has trained over 40,000 individuals worldwide. Over 1,800 partners and a seasoned professional services team help deliver greater time to value. Leading organizations in every industry plus top public sector organizations globally run Cloudera in production.

    Connect with Cloudera

    Read our blogs: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/ and http://vision.cloudera.com/

    Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cloudera

    Visit us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cloudera

    Join the Cloudera Community: http://cloudera.com/community

    Cloudera, Cloudera's Platform for Big Data, Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub Edition, Cloudera Enterprise Flex Edition, Cloudera Enterprise Basic Edition and CDH are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cloudera Inc. in the United States, and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

    ###

    CONTACT: Deborah Wiltshire Cloudera +1 (650) 644-3900 ext. 5907 press@cloudera.com

  • Cloudera Introduces RecordService, Unified Role-Based Policy Enforcement for the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem

    PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, today announced the public beta release of RecordService, a new high-performance security layer for Apache Hadoop that centrally enforces role-based access control policies across the platform. Complementing Apache Sentry (incubating), which provides unified policy definition, RecordService is the first solution to deliver complete row- and column-based security, and dynamic data masking, for every Hadoop access engine. A public beta of RecordService is immediately available under the Apache open source license, and will be transitioned to the Apache Software Foundation in the future.

    Security has been a critical requirement for enterprises as their Hadoop deployments move from pilot to production. To ensure that sensitive data cannot fall into the wrong hands, a comprehensive security approach must include fine-grained access controls that define what data users can see and what they can do with it. However, for enterprises to take full advantage of the power of Hadoop, these access controls cannot limit the agility of the platform or the users. These access permissions must be the same for the user, regardless of their access engine of choice, down to the row- and column-level.

    Sentry, the standard for unified policy definition in Hadoop, plays a crucial role in addressing this by applying consistent policies across all the different access paths. However, some access paths support more granular restrictions than others. As the Hadoop ecosystem has expanded to include diverse access engines such as Apache Spark, Impala, and Apache Solr, it has been challenging to enforce these policies consistently without limiting access to the data itself. For example, while Impala supports granular row- and column-level controls, Spark and MapReduce only support file- or table-level controls. In modern architectures that use multiple access engines, this variance can lead to complicated workarounds or a reliance on the "lowest common denominator" of security, with users either having access to the entire data set or no access at all -- ultimately leading to less agile and less secure Hadoop applications.

    RecordService complements the policy definition of Sentry as a new layer that provides a single point of enforcement -- simplifying security with unified row- and column-level controls for all access paths, including Spark and MapReduce. This fine-grained policy enforcement allows enterprises to take advantage of the full capabilities of Hadoop while eliminating the complex security workarounds that can often lead to security errors. With RecordService, all users can gain insights from their data, securely, using their tool of choice.

    "There have been rapid improvements made to Hadoop security, addressing the growing need to store and analyze sensitive data in the platform. However, for Hadoop to continue to evolve and support the next generation of analytics for more users and access paths, security needs to become universal across the platform," said Eddie Garcia, chief security architect, Cloudera. "With RecordService, the Hadoop community fulfills the vision of unified fine-grained access controls across every Hadoop access path. Together, with leading security advances such as Sentry, RecordService enables enterprises to gain powerful insights from Hadoop with the confidence that a powerful, core security layer is protecting their most sensitive data."

    By enabling the first, native, granular controls for Apache Spark specifically, RecordService plays a key role in advancing the development of Spark to meet enterprise requirements. With security being a core focus area of Spark development, as part of Cloudera's recently announced One Platform Initiative, RecordService is a critical project to help Spark further progress towards becoming the next default processing engine for Hadoop.

    As a new layer that sits between Hadoop's storage and compute engines, RecordService not only consistently enforces the fine-grained, role-based access controls defined by Sentry, but it also provides dynamic data masking across Hadoop. This capability enables organizations to mask sensitive elements of data, protecting it as it is accessed in real-time. With dynamic data masking, more users can access and analyze data without needing permissions for the data itself. The platform offers advanced protection that has never before been available within core Hadoop security.

    In regulated industries, advanced security is critical for protecting sensitive data without limiting the analytic agility necessary for competitive advantage. Capital One is one of the first early users of the beta of RecordService, and actively contributes to the project. RecordService is also being developed in collaboration with Cloudera partners, including Datameer and Platfora, and other Hadoop vendors.

    "RecordService will enable our customers to enforce row- and column-level permissions on data in their large multi-tenant, multi-use, Hadoop clusters," said Raghu Thiagarajan, senior director, Product Management at Datameer. "This will allow data to be stored more efficiently, while ensuring each user role only gets access to what they need. We've worked closely with Cloudera to help improve Hadoop's security options for our customers, and are pleased to engage with the RecordService open source community."

    "Security is at the core of enterprise Hadoop adoption. Cloudera continues to be a leader in driving Hadoop security forward, and RecordService is a key milestone for the open source community," said Denise Hemke, director of Product Management, Platfora. "We are excited to work with Cloudera on developing this new project, and bringing unified granular access controls to our mutual customers, many of whom are in compliance-sensitive markets such as Financial Services."

    RecordService is a key advancement for Hadoop security, complementing existing authorization capabilities. As a new core security layer, native to the Hadoop ecosystem, RecordService enables the continued expansion of Hadoop for the enterprise, so that organizations can innovate without compromise.

    Resources

    Start Contributing - [http://github.com/cloudera/recordservice]

    Download the Public Beta or Try the VM - [www.cloudera.com/downloads]

    This information is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. Cloudera does not guarantee that the beta software will be made generally available or that any individual feature in the beta version will be made generally available. Cloudera may make the beta software generally available, or not, in its sole discretion and without obligation to make any communication of any kind with regard to such availability.

    About Cloudera

    Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified Platform for big data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, access, process, secure, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data. Cloudera's open source big data platform is the most widely adopted in the world, and Cloudera is the most prolific contributor to the open source Hadoop ecosystem. As the leading educator of Hadoop professionals, Cloudera has trained over 40,000 individuals worldwide. Over 1,800 partners and a seasoned professional services team help deliver greater time to value. Leading organizations in every industry plus top public sector organizations globally run Cloudera in production.

    Connect with Cloudera

    Read our blogs: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/ and http://vision.cloudera.com/

    Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cloudera

    Visit us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cloudera

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    Cloudera, Cloudera's Platform for Big Data, Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub Edition, Cloudera Enterprise Flex Edition, Cloudera Enterprise Basic Edition and CDH are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cloudera Inc. in the United States, and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

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    CONTACT: Deborah Wiltshire Cloudera +1 (650) 644-3900 ext. 5907 press@cloudera.com

  • Blue Calypso and Yelp Agree to Initial Order of KIOSentrix(R) Beacons

    DALLAS, Sept. 28, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Blue Calypso, Inc. (BCYP), an innovator of mobile consumer activation, engagement and social advocacy solutions for manufacturers and brick-and-mortar retailers, announced today that Yelp has agreed to explore the use of KIOSentrix AC powered beacons in potential distribution to Yelp's retail customer base. Yelp has committed to an initial order of 4,000 KIOSentrix beacons.  Additionally, Blue Calypso and Yelp have agreed to dismiss their pending lawsuit.

    "We are excited to work with Yelp as they explore the potential use of beacons within their retail customer's store locations. We think Yelp has a great product and is ideal for beacon enablement. This will create a compelling opportunity to enhance the experience that both consumers and retailers have when they use the Yelp platform. As consumers use Yelp to explore restaurants and retail stores, Blue Calypso's beacons could cause those who are directed to a store location to be presented with location-centric content as they enter the store. Our technology could also help retailers know when Yelp has driven customer foot traffic to their location," said Levi. 

    Forward Looking Statements. Statements in this press release that are not statements of historical or current fact constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other unknown factors that could cause the actual results of the Company to be materially different from historical results or from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In addition to statements which explicitly describe such risks and uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements labeled with the terms "believes," "belief," "expects," "intends," "anticipates," "will," or "plans" to be uncertain and forward-looking. The forward-looking statements contained herein are also subject generally to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the Company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    About Blue Calypso, Inc. Dallas-based Blue Calypso, Inc. (BCYP) develops and delivers an innovative location-centric mobile shopper engagement platform for brands and retailers using its patented portfolio of products, including KIOSentrix®, Mobile ADvantage™, DashTAGG® and SOCIALECHO™. The Company employs its unique and flexible platform to connect consumers to brands, drive local in-store traffic, increase shopper spend and shorten the consumer's path-to-purchase. For more information about the company, please visit www.bluecalypso.com

    CONTACT: MEDIA CONTACT Rachel David Rachel.David@hck2.com 972.499.6630 INVESTOR CONTACT Merriman Capital, Inc. Becky Popoff BPopoff@merrimanco.com (415) 568-3925

  • ASETEK – Court confirms judgement, increases damages award and issues injunction

    Now this is big news.  Asetek wins the patent wars against, none other than, Cooler Master. 

    Here is the press release

    San Jose, September 23, 2015. In late 2014, Asetek won a patent infringement case against CMI USA, Inc. (“CMI”) at the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Asetek, and awarded damages based on a 14.5% royalty rate. In a post trial motion, CMI demanded a judgement as a matter of law and a new trial.

    The court yesterday denied CMI's demands, and instead substantially followed Asetek’s requests and issued a permanent injunction barring CMI and its parent Cooler Master from selling certain infringing products into the Unites States.

    Also, the judge awarded Asetek enhanced damages i.e., a 25.375% royalty rate, on CMI’s revenues for sales of infringing products beginning January 1, 2015.

    It should be noted that the matter is appealable by CMI.

    Huge I tell ya HUGE. 

    Well not really, it's just a matter of paying to use a certain technology in your products.  We have seen how TW companies "short cut" the process and just clone whatever they want.  They can then obscure it enough to skirt around the patent or bypass it completely and sell only in EU or Apac.  Assuming the product isn't sold where the company holds the patent there is no issue.  However in this case CM was importing these products to the US which is a red flag.  

    I also read somewhere that the AIO cooler on the FuryX was also made by Cooler Master so there might be some money to be taken there too.

  • G.SKILL Releases RIPJAWS MX780 Customizable RGB Laser Gaming Mouse

    Taipei, Taiwan (23 Sept 2015) – G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world’s leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals,  is releasing the new RIPJAWS series MX780 customizable RGB laser gaming mouse. Watch the following video for an introduction to the unique product features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duEhTnLrh1I

    Ambidextrous & Interchangeable Side Grips
    The RIPJAWS MX780 laser gaming mouse features an ambidextrous design with mirrored button placement that increases adaptability for both right and left-handed gamers, as well as maximizing grip comfort with interchangeable side grips for long term use.

    Adjustable Palm Rest & Weights
    Gamers come in all sizes. This is why the MX780 laser gaming mouse features a height-adjustable palm rest, which allows you to customize the palm support to your preferred height for maximum comfort. Additionally, the entire mouse is constructed upon a solid aluminum base and comes with additional optional 4.5g weights, installed inside of side grip on each side, so you can feel the control every movement and optimize the overall mouse balance for your own personal gaming style.

    8 Fully Programmable Buttons & Customizable RGB Backlighting
    Enable countless customizability with 8 fully programmable buttons and customizable RGB backlighting across 4 lighting zones in a full range of RGB colors.

    G.SKILL Unified Driver System & On-board Profile Storage
    Designed for ultimate customizability, the G.SKILL Unified Driver System unlocks the limits to customization and grants you complete control over macros, key function programming, light settings, lighting patterns, and loads of other settings for full personalization. Built into the mouse is 512KB of onboard memory, capable of storing up to five complete sets of key and lighting configurations within the mouse, so your personal gaming experience follows wherever you and your mouse goes.

    8,200dpi Avago Laser Sensor & Durable Omron Micro-Switch
    Using only the best-in-class components, the RIPJAWS MX780 is equipped with the latest gaming-grade Avago laser sensor and Omron micro-switch. You’ll enjoy an extreme gaming experience capable of up to 8,200dpi and 1,000Hz polling rate, as well as an ultra-durability of 20 million clicks.

    Pricing and Availability
    The new RIPJAWS MX780 gaming mouse will be rolling out to authorized G.SKILL worldwide distribution partners from late September 2015, and is now available on Newegg.com at $59.99!

    For more product information and specifications, please visit the G.SKILL product webpage at: http://gskill.com/en/product/ripjaws-mx780---laser-gaming-mouse

    Product page on Newegg.com: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826977011

    About G.SKILL
    Established in 1989 by PC hardware enthusiasts, G.SKILL specializes in high performance memory and SSD products, designed for PC gamers and enthusiasts around the world. Combining technical innovation and rock solid quality through our in-house testing lab and talented R&D team, G.SKILL continues to create record-breaking memory for each generation of hardware and hold the no. 1 brand title in overclocking memory.