If you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), you know that you’re operating in a fast-paced, ever-changing business environment. Customers want their demands met instantly, and increasing competition multiplies the pressure you’re under. If you can’t deliver, you can be sure somebody else will. Fortunately, the technology landscape is changing the way you do business. Mobility, social media, and Big Data are leveling the playing field and making it possible for companies like yours to access more sophisticated technology, reach bigger audiences, target their messages, and innovate in their offerings. Yet nothing has changed the landscape so much as the cloud.

This report provides an overview of the Oracle Cloud at Customer portfolio (this includes Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, Oracle Big Data Cloud at Customer, Oracle SaaS at Customer and Oracle Cloud at Customer) and analyzes its capabilities to satisfy the need of enterprises for a next-generation computing platform. A next-generation computing platform allows enterprises to deploy workloads across the premises and the public cloud. For enterprises running their next-generation applications on a next-generation computing platform, Oracle Cloud at Customer does very well because of Oracle’s vision of the “chip-to-click” integrated technology stack (i.e., from the CPU silicon, across all OSI layers and all the way to the end-user mouse click). With Oracle using the same technology stack and machines both in its cloud and on premises, it has the highest degree of identicality across these offerings from all vendors that are part of Constellation Research’s Market Overview on next-genera

According to Dr. Barry Devlin of 9sight Consulting, the truth behind all the talk about big data and the possibilities it can offer is not hard to see, provided that organizations are willing to return to the principles of good data management processes.

SAS Institute is gearing up to make a self-service data preparation play with its new Data Loader for Hadoop offering. Designed for profiling, cleansing, transforming and preparing data to load it into the open source data processing framework for analysis, Data Loader for Hadoop is a lynchpin in SAS's data management strategy for 2015. This strategy centers on three key themes: 'big data' management and governance involving Hadoop, the streamlining of access to information, and the use of its federation and integration offerings to enable the right data to be available, at the right time.