In a move to expand functionality and allow for simpler adoption of its market-leading enterprise social collaboration offerings, Jive Software has released a series of new updates that go live Wednesday.

Disk storage is a lot like closet space—you can never have enough. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of big data. The very name—"big data"—implies more data than a typical storage platform can handle. So where exactly does this leave the ever-vigilant CIO? With a multitude of decisions to make and very little information to go by.

The Linux Foundation today announced that it would hold a symposium on the cloud, big data and open source this August in San Diego dubbed CloudOpen.

Storage technology has evolved and matured to the point where it has started to approach commodity status in many data centers. Nevertheless, today's enterprises are faced with evolving needs that can strain storage technologies -- a case in point is the push for big data analytics, an initiative that brings business intelligence (BI) capabilities to large data sets.

The floods that devastated the hard disk industry in Thailand are now half a year old, and the prices per terabyte are finally dropping once again. That means data will start piling up and people around the office will wonder what can be done with it. Perhaps there are some insights in those log files? Perhaps a bit of statistical analysis will find some nuggets of gold buried in all of that noise? Maybe we can find enough change buried in the couch cushions of these files to give us all a raise?

The changing nature of IT, as well as the rapid evolution of business processes, means that you'll likely face the need for an analytical tool like Hadoop in the very near future.