This week, quarterly earnings results kept rolling in; our colleagues over at Gigaom covered some of the most interesting highlights, including T-Mobile’s early successes with its “un-carrier” model and Netflix’s new pricing tiers. Meanwhile, Gigaom Research readers were taking a look back at 2013, checking out comparative results from a cloud survey we conducted last spring. Reports on the past quarter in social technologies and on the future of Hadoop in the enterprise were also popular this week.
First, in “How Hadoop passes an IT audit,”John Webster notes that it’s time for Hadoop to grow up. “Not originally created for the enterprise environment, Hadoop was built for internet data center environments like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter,” he observes. However, as more enterprise-level industry segments deploy Haoop, it’s clear that Hadoop must mature further, “in order to be regarded as a viable enterprise platform capable of supporting critical business functions running real-time applications.” Webster goes on to analyze Hadoop’s current role in enterprise IT, and what compliance, security, and support improvements will need to be implemented before it can be considered a viable enterprise solution.
Next, in “Survey: benchmarking cloud expectations,” Laura Stuart revisits our 2013 Q2 cloud expectations survey, which queried two IT buyer populations (leading-edge as well as mainstream buyers) about their expectations at attitudes about the cloud. By analyzing these results one year later, Stuart provides today’s IT buyers with a valuable set of metrics to benchmark their own progress and attitudes and cloud practices as compared to their peers.
Last, in “Social fourth-quarter analysis and outlook,” Stowe Boyd looks back at the past quarter in the social technology space, with a special focus on the trends and technologies that impact the workplace. Boyd highlights the rise of technologies like Holocracy and a rethinking of typical managerial roles (as embraced by companies like Asana and GitHub). Boyd also weighs in on issues affecting some of the giants of enterprise technology – namely, Microsoft’s quest to find a new CEO and its future prospects, post-Ballmer.
Also popular this week:
Mobile fourth-quarter analysis and outlook
