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Yesterday, I reported that Oracle does indeed have a big data strategy in place, complete with plans for Hadoop, NoSQL and even an integration of the R statistical analysis software. Today, some of the startups affected by Oracles impending moves weighed in with their takes on the situation. Maybe theyre just keeping brave faces, but the consensus is that Oracles forays into their respective spaces just validate the work theyve been doing, and they welcome the competition. Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera Via e-mail: We are pleased that Oracle has decided to validate the importance of Hadoop as a key component of enterprise data management and analysis. We are encouraged and excited that a company with Oracles influence and reputation will be making investments in this space and we look forward to working with them in companies with the most demanding data environments. We are looking forward to their support on moving the work in the Apache Software Foundation forward with the community. We

Mark Imbriaco of Heroku Delivering a Platform as a Service isnt easy and figuring out how to handle things when they go wrong marks a huge leap in maturity for a company. When youre small, panicking and then having one or two of the few people who built the software fix the problem may work, but as the company grows youre going to have to figure out how to react when things fail. Luckily, Mark Imbriaco, the director of operations at Heroku , shared some of the steps it takes when a PaaS fumbles. When disaster strikes, such as the 67-hour Amazon outage during April , Heroku follows a set of policies designed to get the service back up quickly and to reduce stress on the engineers dealing with the problem. Because the company requires all its engineers, even software engineer to take time on call, Heroku believes that a notification peg must arrive with a link telling the on-call engineer what to do. At that point, the solution should take less than five minutes to solve. Otherwise, the

If youre one of the 50,000 people Oracle expects to converge on the Moscone Center in San Francisco starting Sunday or even if youre not here are some things to look for at the big Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Conference. 1. Oracle will announce its latest acquisition. It will purchase Hewlett-Packard . Kidding! Or am I? After the past few weeks, who knows? Much of the news coming out in recently about HPs buyout of Autonomy was flavored by rumors that Oracle would buy HP itself once the price was right. 2. The company will finesse its relationships with hardware partners. As a pure-play software company, Oracle used to have strong relationships with the independent Sun Microsystems, then Dell and HP. Then it bought Sun , and these other companies are now competitors. Oracle is now a proud purveyor of big-iron data center hardware with Exadata, which melds compute, storage and networking functions. That means the company now competes with EMC, Dell, NetApp, and HP. Nonetheless, EMC CEO Joe

Add to My Stories Share Utilities such as water supplies and the power grid face a rising number of cyber break-ins by attackers using sophisticated attacks. Acting DHS Deputy Undersecretary Greg Schaffer said that industries are increasingly vulnerable to hackers and foreign agents due to 'connected' equipment - and 'there have been intrusions.' Earlier this month, security researchers demonstrated that it was even possible to remotely 'open' jail cell doors if they were controlled using 'programmable logic controllers' - common automated controls. The 'Stuxnet' worm - a sophisticated cyber attack on the Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran opened a new era of cyber-warfare. But nations such as the US are taking steps to defend themselves 'We are connecting equipment that has never been connected before to global networks,' Schaffer said. Hackers and perhaps foreign governments 'are knocking on the doors of these systems - there hav

In the months leading up to the press conference earlier this week, speculation about the prospects for Amazons new tablet reached a crescendo. Would the new tablet be a worthy competitor? Might it even dethrone the iPad? Even before details were leaked to the press, Forrester predicted that Amazon would sell 3-5 million tablets in Q4. Following an exclusive hands-on preview , TechCrunchs MG Siegler reported that its going to be a big deal potentially huge. Since Monday, when CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage to unveil Amazons new tablet, named the Kindle Fire , individuals have posted some 11k+ comments in sources tracked by SocialNuggets , a leading social media analytics firm. Mining these data gives us an early indication of how the market views and may react to the Kindle Fire when it is introduced mid-November. Will the Kindle Fire unlock demand for tablets? While not available for another six weeks, almost 10% of individuals posting comments earlier this week explicitly indicated

Add to My Stories Share SpaceXis working on the worlds first reusable rocket - relying on launch stages that 'ease' themselves back to Earth with boosters, rather than falling away and burning up. Even the manned module on top will have no chute - relying on a 'controlled' descent using boosters. After a partnership with NASA, this vehicle could well be the future of manned space flight. Space X's concept video is below. Space X founder ElonMusk said his company was working on a new version of its Falcon 9 rocket (pictured) which c ould cut by 100-fold the cost of trips into space - and could even lead to a vehicle capable of making the return trip to Mars. Falcon 9 has already made an orbital test flight - but the new version's Merlin engines would 'ease' themselves back to Earth on rockets i na speech he said: A fully and rapidly reusable system is fully required forlife to become multi-planetary, for us to establish life on Mars. Thenew rocke

Andy Parsons CTO of Bookish Developers at the Surge conference in Baltimore have a love-hate relationship with Americas largest online retailer and cloud provider. But repeated tales of Amazon Web Services failures were immediately followed by assurances that the service was cheaper and better than buying your own hardware. As for other cloud providers, Andy Parsons, CTO for startup Bookish, summed it up after being asked if he had even looked at other cloud service providers: Yes, but the devil you know is better than the devil you dont. This might be considered a figure of speech, except that Parsons spent a good portion of his presentation cautioning the audience about how ephemeral Amazon EC2s local storage was, explaining the poor latency of storing stuff to Elastic Block Storage (Amazons persistent storage) and lamenting the fact that Amazons networking was pretty constrained. And he wasnt the only one. Mark Imbriaco, director of cloud operations at Heroku, had a similar approac

Karmasphere, a startup focused on helping analysts write better big data applications, raised $6 million in a Series B round from Presidio Ventures, Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners. That brings the Cupertino, Calif.-based companys total funding to $11 million, and the announced VC investment in Hadoop to more than $30 million in the last 30 days. As the old saying goes, youd have to have been living in a cave for the past year to have not heard about Hadoop, the open-source data-processing engine. Once a darling among large web sites such as Yahoo and Facebook, Hadoop has spread like wildfire into web companies of all sizes and, thanks in part to Clouderas presence, into the banking, intelligence and other traditional industries. So promising is the technology that IBM , EMC and, now, Oracle are getting into fray as well. Karmaspheres Analyst product sits above the core Hadoop distribution platform layer where companies such as Cloudera, EMC and MapR play, instead helping com

The race in mobile has defaulted to Apples iOS and Googles Android operating systems, but that hasnt stopped Samsung from thinking about open sourcing Bada, or Microsoft from pushing ahead with Windows Phone 7 and a partnership with Nokia . So while Meego , Symbian and webOS have hit the rocks, theres still plenty of competition gunning for the chance to fight it out with Apple and Google. At our recent Mobilize conference, I accosted our speakers and attendees, such as Stephen Bye the CTO of Sprint and Ville Vesterinen, the CEO of the hot game company that created Shadow Cities , to ask them whether or not the world needed another mobile OS. For the most part folks were doubtful, but one developer surprisingly didnt mind the idea of a third, and its clear the carriers want one to dampen the power that Google and Apple hold over the ecosystem. Check it out. Watch this video for free on GigaOM Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free tr