This tactic is a slippery slope, though. A malicious actor who manages to infect your device and crack one such combination will be able to impersonate you by accessing your multiple accounts. Of course, you can keep a separate file with all your credentials or use similar characters in a different order, but these methods are not safe enough either.

The silver lining is that there are hugely convenient services you can use to step up your authentication hygiene. They are called–you guessed it–password managers. In a nutshell, these are tools that enable you to securely store numerous login-password pairs for various web resources.

How are password managers used?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of password managers to choose from: in-browser ones and standalone third-party apps. In this review, we will go over both categories. Regardless of the type, these tools store all your sign-in credentials for different sites and automate the authentication process.

This makes complex things easy and adds an extra layer of security to your data. Plus, it prevents anyone who compromises one account from accessing other accounts, thus helping you avoid the scourge of a single point of failure (SPOF).

Top in-browser password managers

To begin, let us dive into the password management features built into popular web browsers. One of their key advantages boils down to user-friendliness, because the browser prompts you to save a password and then allows you to view it in a dedicated interface whenever you want.

Another perk is the ability to synchronize your credentials between different devices. Passwords can also be encrypted and stored that way in the cloud. The browsers listed in the following rundown are free to use and so are their built-in password managers.

Google Chrome

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android.

Chrome’s built-in password manager offers you to store passwords under the umbrella of your Google account. It is convenient and easy for users with any level of tech skills to get the hang of.

This service can generate passwords for you, but keep in mind that the resulting combos are not as strong as the ones most commercial counterparts can create. For instance, there is no option to specify a larger number of characters than the default set-up offers or to use special characters.

Overall, this is a mainstream and very intuitive tool. The only caveat is that many security experts find it fairly unreliable because there is no master password, and if an account is hacked, the intruder may get hold of all the data in one hit.

Another thing worth considering is that user data is Google’s main product leveraged for targeted advertising and other sketchy things. Therefore, it might not be a good idea to store all your credentials using a single built-in password manager, especially when it comes to extremely sensitive information.

Mozilla Firefox

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Firefox allows you to encrypt your passwords with a single master key. Furthermore, it is open-source and does not share users’ data with a parent company as some competing web browsers do.

The tool is equipped with a classic feature set: storing login-password pairs, encrypting the master password and the option for Windows users to import passwords from Chrome and Internet Explorer. It uses the symmetric 256-bit AES algorithm to encrypt users’ sign-in details. The manager also includes a component that generates complex passwords.

Opera

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Although Opera’s built-in password manager is fairly rudimentary because it simply stores passwords and web forms, it has two significant advantages over some competitors. First, as is the case with the Firefox counterpart, it allows you to add a master password that will be required to unlock passwords in the browser’s storage. The master password matches the string used to log into the computer, though. The second advantage is the availability of a VPN.

Unfortunately, Opera is not immune to security incidents. In April 2016, the company reportedly suffered a breach in which hackers obtained more than 1.7 million Sync passwords and login credentials. However, the likelihood of such an attack occurring again is minuscule because Opera software engineers have since provided the option to add an extra passphrase to the Sync feature, which can now encrypt passwords, or all data synchronized between devices.

Safari

Supported operating systems: macOS, iOS.

Unlike Chrome or Edge, Apple does not allow its proprietary browser to handle sign-in credentials in isolation from the operating system. Passwords are kept in the iCloud Keychain, which functions seamlessly on Macs as well as iPhones and iPads.

Other than that, there are hardly any functional differences from the browsers mentioned above. Be advised, though, that you cannot specify a master password. The built-in password generator boasts decent efficiency: it distinguishes between authentication, registration and password change forms; moreover, it harnesses individual password creation algorithms for some sites.

The Safari browser is not available for PCs or Android devices, so this password manager is only suitable for those entirely committed to the Apple ecosystem.

Microsoft Edge

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

Since the redesigned Edge is based on the same open-source Chromium core as Google Chrome, the password manager configuration mechanisms in the two browsers are very similar. The browser has been recently enhanced with a password generator, which appears to work better than Chrome’s counterpart. Previously saved passwords must be deleted individually so that they are eliminated from Edge on other synced devices.

To sum it up, whereas built-in password managers are easy for the average user to master, they should be treated as a handy extension rather than as a separate solution that secures your passwords from different angles.

Their weakest link is that if someone gains unauthorized access to your computer and opens your browser, all passwords may be compromised in a snap because additional defenses such as extra user verification mechanisms are missing in most cases.

Best Commercial Password Managers

Password managers made by third-party developers offer more functionality. These products are cross-browser, provide more sophisticated mechanisms for generating passwords and have additional bells and whistles under the hood.

Dashlane

Price: $0 – $5.99 per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

In addition to basic password management, this tool allows you to check your stored passwords for strength and have them automatically replaced with more complex ones in a single click if necessary. You also get 1GB of secure storage and a VPN service with no traffic limitations.

Dashlane supports Windows Hello, giving you the ability to log in with biometrics, including face and fingerprint scans. Plus, it allows you to check if your email addresses, passwords and financial information have been compromised and leaked on the dark web. The app has a free version, but with the caveat that it cannot store more than 50 passwords.

Keeper

Price: $2.91 – $6.01 per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Keeper boasts a streamlined and user-friendly interface while providing 10GB of secure storage. Like Dashlane, Keeper supports biometric authentication with Windows Hello. This password manager additionally offers a two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism dubbed Keeper DNA, which generates one-time passwords on mobile devices. Keeper has built-in dark web monitoring and encrypted chat features that allow users to share files securely.

1Password

Price: $3.99 – $7.99 per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Just like the apps described above, 1Password is compatible with Windows Hello and scans the dark web for leaks of your sensitive data. It provides 1GB of encrypted storage. One of the awesome things about it is the family account option that supports up to five users simultaneously with an unlimited number of devices. 1Password also comes with a built-in parental control feature that prevents your kids from changing passwords for important services.

LastPass

Price: €0-€3.9 ($4.73) per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

The free version of LastPass provides the broadest range of features across the whole spectrum of commercial password managers. It allows you to store an unlimited number of passwords on an unlimited number of devices with an extra option of granting access to one more user. The premium version lets you give access to multiple users and includes biometric authentication features, 1GB of secure storage, as well as 24/7 email tech support.

How do you choose the best password manager?

Password managers make it much easier to work with web services and to secure your accounts. This way of handling passwords is definitely more secure than old-school approaches, such as reusing passwords or using terribly similar combinations. It comes as no surprise that these apps are gaining a good deal of traction among users these days.

Nevertheless, when choosing a password manager that suits you the most, be sure to scrutinize its features. In-browser services are convenient and understandable for most users. Still, they tend to lag behind their commercial analogs in terms of generating strong passwords, availability of two-factor authentication and the option of switching between browsers. As a result, most InfoSec professionals think of these tools as garden-variety browser extensions and advise against using them to store sensitive data such as e-banking credentials.

Commercial password managers offer overarching functionality and work as standalone apps. Although many experts consider them more reliable than those built into browsers, the vast majority of users prefer the latter for their day-to-day web surfing.

Amsterdam-based David Balaban is the founder of the Privacy-PC.com project and is a computer security researcher with more than 17 years of experience in malware analysis.

The post Comparing In-Browser-Based, Commercial Password Managers appeared first on eWEEK.

Generally, connected users spent more time than ever online in 2020 searching for products, answers, solutions and information. Consumers, spoiled by the likes of Google and Amazon, expect to quickly and easily find relevant products and information. Businesses must not only deliver fast and personalized search but also allow non-technical users such as product managers, brand owners and merchandisers to measure, manage and optimize the experience without depending on developers and IT. 

A company’s investment in its site search is directly tied to its success, and a new survey from Algolia explores this topic. The “State of Search and Discovery” report, conducted by Algolia with ONR, is the first extensive market research on search and discovery tools. The report outlines the findings of a recent survey of 500 site search-knowledgeable professionals from the U.S., Germany, France and the UK.

Respondents from a variety of industries, from tech to retail to media, provided insight on a range of search-related topics, including investments in features, teams and tools, types of implementation, budgets and decision-making.

Some key findings reflect specific trends in software development, from the rise of composite apps and managed services to breaking down silos between dev and business. Other results detail how companies must strategically invest in search, because extra features and more people don’t always translate to higher financial returns. Here are some of the key findings:

Data Point No. 1: A quality site search experience for both end-users and internal teams drives success.

While site search has always been a key pillar of great UX, the survey found that making search tools easy to use for employee teams—more specifically, non-engineering teams—is even more important for quality search. This is no surprise; business teams (digital strategists, product managers, merchandisers, marketers and content editors) are the ones defining growth strategies for companies’ products or content. 

Data Point No. 2: Successful site search is not an IT project. 

The survey showed that financial success requires a cross-functional team. Not only does the direct engagement of business teams drive financial success, but it frees up precious IT/developer team time that can then go toward improving the core user experience of companies’ digital properties. 

Data Point No. 3: Not just search: discovery. 

The most implemented features are those supporting product and content discovery—filtering, personalization and recommendations—followed closely by mobile-optimized search and search analytics. Voice search, image search and A/B testing are quickly becoming table stakes. Companies with discovery capabilities are 2.2X more likely to realize high success from site search.

Data Point No. 4: Growing teams must be strategic. 

Simply put, more engineers do not always mean more success. Organizations using in-house tools have overall larger teams, and while they reach average success relatively easily, getting to great is more complex. Those using third-party tools have, on average, smaller engineering teams and, when they choose to grow them, see direct correlation between engineering team size and success. 

Data Point No. 5: More features is not always better.

Third-party tools see a continued increase in success as they add search functionality, while in-house tools don’t see higher financial returns after they develop 3-4 features. Whether that’s a function of more features affecting speed or relevance, or silos between developer and business teams is anyone’s guess, but one thing is clear: growing features ought to be strategic as well. 

Data Point No. 6: It takes time to get results, and third-party tools get them faster. 

Site search requires ongoing investment in teams, dollars, and time to test, optimize and adapt to user behavior feedback. Survey results show that overall, third-party tools deliver success sooner, and progress to high success at a faster rate.

Data Point No. 7: Increased investment in site search directly corresponds to financial success. 

89% of respondents are either very satisfied or satisfied with the ROI from site search, and those who report high levels of site search success are 2.7x more likely to experience above-average growth rates. It is no surprise that 79% of survey respondents expect their site search investment to increase in the next 12 months. 

Data Point No. 8: In summary …

As we move toward 2021, businesses will be taking a closer look at their digitization plans, and a key part of these plans is search. The above insights and best practices illustrate the connection between successful site search and a company’s growth. Businesses must ensure their site search is optimized from the inside out, empowering internal teams to tune, adjust and tweak as needed so that external users can easily discover, find and buy.

If you have a suggestion for an eWEEK Data Points article, email cpreimesberger@eweek.com.

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In naming graph DBs one of the 10 biggest data and analytics trends of 2019, Gartner predicted that the category will grow a whopping 100 percent annually through 2022 “due to the need to ask complex questions across complex data, which is not always practical or even possible at scale using SQL queries.”

Believe the prognosticators or don’t believe them, the movement is in fact here, and the DBs are being sold.

Go here to read eWEEK’s listing of Top Database Management Systems Vendors.

A good data point here is that graph databases are being used in multiple industries, including financial services, pharmaceutical, health care, telecom, retail and government. Most often they are utilized to explore relationships across massive data silos and achieve the holy grail of webscale analytics in real time. These applications include fraud and money-laundering detection, security analytics, personalized recommendation engines, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Graph Represents the Real World

As Noel Gomez, data sciences leader at biopharmaceutical giant Amgen, said: “The value in graph is that you can represent the real world, represent objects that you can relate to easily.”

“A knock against graph used to be that it had hit a wall in terms of performance and analytics capabilities when the data volume grew too big and the answers were needed in real time,” TigerGraph executive Gaurav Deshpande told eWEEK. “But the technology has evolved to tackle the toughest data challenges in real time, regardless of how large or complex the data set.”

To get a snapshot on current thinking about graph’s future, seven industry experts were asked the following question: “Graph Is dominating the database market; where will it be in 2022?”

“Graph databases need to be all about deep link analytics. That’s because the more links you can traverse––what’s known as a hop––the greater the insight,” Deshpande said. “But the difficulty in scaling the computational requirements for large datasets has made it difficult to do deep link analytics, which requires going more than three hops deep into the dataset.

“But the technology has advanced. Thanks to improvements, such as faster data loading to build graphs quickly, faster execution of parallel graph algorithms and the ability to scale up and out for distributed applications, graph is meeting or even exceeding its promise.” 

Ely Turkenitz, IS Manager for Santa Clara County in northern California, said “graph databases will not replace the Oracle, SQL Server, MySQLs of the world; it’s not a replacement, it’s an addition. It’s for a different use case. Specifically for government, knowing your customer, the 360 angle and the fraud detection.”

Here’s what people on the front lines of this trend had to say.

Tony Baer, dbInsight:

“Today, enterprises are beginning to understand what a graph database is. By 2022, I expect that the graph databases will become more accessible thanks to the cloud and automated tools that help optimize how the data is modeled and distributed. But the broadest impact of graph will be invisible, as the embedded database behind applications that involve connected people, processes, and/or things. Graph databases will graduate from powering early adopter use cases for digital communities to the mainstream of enterprise and consumer applications.”

Daniel Gutierrez, InsideBigData:

“Graph databases are rising in popularity because they represent an ideal solution for storing data and connecting relationships between data much more effectively than traditional relational databases. The expansion of enterprise applications needing to manage connected data is the primary factor driving the growth of the global graph database market. The graph database ecosystem is innovating rapidly. By 2022, graph databases should be firmly deployed by many prominent industries.”

Tom Smith, Research Analyst at Devada, writer for DZone:

“In 2022, companies will be ingesting streaming data from infinite social, IoT, and retail sources into a fully-integrated data fabric of databases from which robotic process automation (RPA) will be automatically generating dashboards and reports and artificial intelligence (AI) will be producing unforeseen insights to inform and improve business operations, patient outcomes, and customer experience–both B2B and B2C.”

Aaron Zornes, MDM Institute:

“Master data management (MDM) platforms are evolving to meet the dictates of the evolving digital economy. Today, the ‘more modern’ MDM platform incorporates graph technology, infuses insights from the data using advanced analytics and ML, and offers big data scale performance in the cloud. The challenges of employing graph tech (UI, query, DB) mandates a focus on update speed and scalability. Simply put, first-generation graph DBs do not provide the OLTP-like update speed and scalability required for enterprises to renovate/replace their RDBMS-based legacy MDM infrastructure.

“Moreover, the digital economy mandates a connected customer experience (e.g., blended, multi-channel), compliance (e.g., fraud detection), and business alignment. Again, first-gen graph DBs do not meet the requirement that deeper than 2-3 node hopping for analytics be high speed, not batch. The good news is that market-leading businesses and disruptive challengers are both forcing this issue with MDM solution providers–with the end result that both start-ups and mega-vendors are paying attention to these requirements, albeit with the mega vendors too often cobbling together a graph layer as an interim solution.”

Jeff Kagen, wireless analyst:

“The latest graph databases are better suited than traditional databases to solving some top-of-mind challenges for the telecommunications industry. Detecting and preventing fraud is at the top of the list of things networks must control. The threat grows every day, so network security must be able to learn how to identify weak links in the system, of which there are usually many. AI and machine learning are becoming the go-to methods for telcos to stay ahead of the next wave of threats. In fact, AI and machine learning may be the only solution to adequately handle the problem. Graph databases are proving a powerful tool in enabling the analytical techniques that AI and machine learning rely on.”

George Anadiotis, Linked Data Orchestration/ZDNet: 

“2018 was the Year of the Graph, the year graph databases went mainstream. I have no reason to think this will change, it will only accelerate. To quote Accenture CTO Applied AI Jean-Luc Chatelain: ‘Knowledge Graphs are the new black, seeing, for example, Microsoft making graph a centerpiece of its strategy and messaging, or Salesforce doing graph R&D for Einstein, we can expect this to trickle down to early and late majority adopters by 2022.’

“Graph databases are a natural fit for working with knowledge graphs. Although diversity is a strength and has been natural for an innovating field, standardization will help graph database adoption immensely. Bridging different technical approaches and cultures is challenging, but the signs we’ve seen in the W3C standardization efforts are encouraging. I expect to continue to see innovation coming from graph databases, leading developments in data management, and graph database adoption expanding.”

Conclusion

Based on what we heard from these experts, there are compelling reasons for graph’s upswing. Three years is a long time in this industry. It will be fascinating to watch where all this goes during that span of time. 

This article was updated from an original post in July 2019.

The post Why Experts See Graph Databases Headed for Mainstream Use appeared first on eWEEK.

However, along with its important purpose, the project is fraught with potential snags involving personal health care and geo-tracking data that could become problems in the future, according to data privacy advocates.

Google and Apple are working on a platform to enable contact tracing, a way to quantify data that identifies people who have been exposed to the virus and with whom they have been in contact, the companies revealed April 10. Starting in May, the two IT giants will release application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.

APIs first, then mobile apps planned

The APIs will be followed by a comprehensive Bluetooth platform in the following months to which users will be able to opt in. This will be a robust application that would allow the public at large to participate, if they choose to do so; it also will enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities.  

“All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems,” the companies said in a joint media advisory. “Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID-19 and accelerate the return of everyday life.”

Here’s how it would work, from a user’s standpoint:

• A smartphone owner who tests either positive or negative for the coronavirus can input their result into an app from a public health authority, which will feed into an anonymous “identifier beacon,” according to an explanation from Google.

• Users then upload their identifier records to the cloud, following which they will receive a notification if they have been exposed to anyone who has tested positive for the virus.

• That identifier will then be anonymously exchanged with anyone the user comes into contact with who also has the service enabled.

So, if you’re sitting, standing or walking in the vicinity of a person with this information stored on his/her phone, you will get a notification of his/her infection or non-infection. It’s then up to you how you might want to interact with—or completely avoid—that person.

Multiple security concerns raised

An important question is this: How many people will use this app, and since there are always a high percentage of smartphone users who won’t opt in to something like this, how effective can it be, knowing that anybody can be carrying the virus and may or may not be identifiable with such an app? Of course, there’s no way to predict how many people will buy in to using an app like this, and neither company is volunteering to guess.

Health care authorities around the world have identified contact tracing as one of the key solutions to stop the rapid spread of the coronavirus, with several governments around the world, including Israel, Thailand and Hong Kong, using technology to track exposure and enforce quarantines, CNN reported. Still, an app such as this would need to be pervasive among the population to be successful.

Naturally, the project has raised the concerns of data privacy advocates and health care IT specialists because it does involve personal health information, mobile devices, security, public agencies and the internet—a potentially combustible security-risk combination at the least. They also have concerns in general with contact tracing technology, contending that it could potentially be used as a surveillance tool once the pandemic is over. Others have also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing.

One also could legitimately wonder if a project of this kind could develop some security problems over time with personal health information that might be difficult at best to patch and repair. However, “privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze,” Apple said in a media advisory.

What a legal data privacy expert contends

Attorney Andrew Pery of ABBYY has been researching and following ethical use of technology (AI, machine-learning data, etc.) and has written on the topic for the AIIM association and is currently writing a book on AI ethics for the American Bar Association. ABBYY is a multinational software company that specializes in document capture and optical character recognition.

“The use of tracing mobile apps could have far-reaching implications long after the curve is finally flattened and we’re back to ‘normal’ lives,” Pery told eWEEK in a media advisory. “Ethical use of AI and mobile apps ought to be considered not only a legal but as a moral obligation. It must be medically necessary and determined by public health experts.

“Additionally, processing of personal data must be proportionate to the actual need. Furthermore, if tech companies are going to develop tracing apps for ‘public interest,’ then they need to have ethical considerations to secure trust and adoption: guarantee equal access and treatment, address privacy concerns, and address data usage concerns.”

Apple and Google already track users with their phones if those users have their geo-positioning service turned on—and most users never turn it off.

The argument for mobile tracing apps for coronavirus data is that there is empirical evidence to suggest that the application of rigorous wide-scale testing coupled with the application of mobile technology can blunt and control infection and mortality rates associated with COVID-19, Pery said.

“For example, Facebook, by virtue of its ‘Data for Good’ project, is designed to track movements of people to measure and anticipate potential outbreaks, and in the coronavirus context, researchers and nonprofits can use the maps, which are built with aggregated and anonymized data that people opt in to share, to understand and help combat the spread of the virus,” Pery said.

“The argument against mobile tracking applications [is that they] represent an unwelcome intrusion to privacy, given that the proposed COVID-19 digital containment application will likely require wide-scale adoption and data subject consent. GDPR offers provisions to work around PII [personally identifiable information] when it is grounds for public interest,” Pery said. 

“Apart from the balancing of privacy rights with public interest, it is incumbent on the technology sector and on policy makers to implement ethically sound, transparent and fair guidelines relating to the use of AI driven profiling and sharing highly sensitive health information.” 

Data protection pro offers his take

Russell P. Reeder, CEO of cloud-based data protection company Infrascale, told eWEEK he believes the Apple/Google COVID-19 tracking technology will never work as an opt-in solution.

“It’s great to see Apple and Google come together to create a solution that we could all use to track when/if we’ve come in contact with someone that within two weeks tests positive with COVID-19,” Reeder wrote in an email. “There are also encryption technologies available to help maintain ownership and privacy of your data. While all of the pieces seem to be in place and technically speaking, it is not complicated to do, it will never work as an opt-in solution.

“Partial location data of some people and partial COVID-19 data of others will create a system that could actually do more harm than good, as people will grow to trust incorrect data. As Americans, we have the Fourth Amendment that protects us from unreasonable search and seizures, as well as many statutory laws like HIPAA that protect our health information, and the FTC that enforces our consumer privacy rights. Our right to privacy will have to be balanced with the underlying threat posed to us in interest of public safety and improving the quality of life, much like our speed limits and seat-belt laws. Before people get upset about these potential digital solutions, they have to remember that most of us have been forced to stay at home by law for our own safety.”

Why Manual Contact Tracing Doesn’t Work

In late March, a research team at the University of Oxford, writing in the journal Science, said the spread of the coronavirus is “too fast to be contained by manual contact tracing,” and a Bluetooth-like technology would be needed to complement it. Such an app could “replace a week’s work of manual contact tracing with instantaneous signals transmitted to and from a central server,” they wrote.

 “The intention is not to impose the technology as a permanent change to society, but we believe it is under these pandemic circumstances [that] it is necessary and justified to protect public health,” researchers said.

eWEEK will keep a close eye on developments in this sector and file periodic reports.

The post How Apple, Google Plan to Mobilize Tracking of COVID-19 Virus appeared first on eWEEK.

Those features took a huge jump this week as Microsoft made a significant play to make its browser once again the one to chase.

Let’s talk about this updated browser this week.

The Recurring Browser Problem

If we look at how market leadership changed from Netscape to Microsoft to Google and then, perhaps, back to Microsoft, I think it comes down to one recurring mistake: not coupling the browser to the revenue-generating product family that the browser enhanced. This mistake was most evident in Netscape’s catastrophic failure.

The browser was a doorway into something else that still needed to develop. Again, Netscape instead overly focused on Microsoft rather than anticipating the need for a Yahoo or Google, and it didn’t end well. The mistake was looking at the browser as if it were a stand-alone product, but it isn’t. It is a gateway into the wonders of the web. It was as if a car dealer came up with a promotion where if you bought a new car, you got the radio for free—then forgot about the car and started giving away free radios. That wouldn’t end well, either.

Particularly with “free” offerings, you have to think through the solution and then couple the revenue to the “free” component; otherwise, it will be under-resourced. Forgetting that, and then under-resourcing the effort, has been the historical problem with browsers—one that it appears Microsoft now fully understands and won’t repeat.

Microsoft’s Chromium Browser Solution

When Microsoft pivoted from Windows to Azure as its core offering, it did something interesting to the browser. It made the browser strategic again because, while IE and Edge were a free feature of Windows, they were a gateway into Azure. This move not only put the focus back on the browser, but it also provided critical resources and a different perspective.

It wasn’t critical to Windows, and trying to force it to become essential resulted in anti-trust problems. But as a front end to Azure, it is vital, and other cloud providers also have platforms and browsers. Since Azure must be browser-agnostic, creating an artificial proprietary link between the offerings would have ended badly for both.

What was needed was a focus on just making the browser the best in the market and a far better front end to Microsoft’s cloud offerings. If funding flows back from those offerings to browser development, they gained a solution that made sense rather than the Windows approach, which didn’t.

Now Edge developers could more easily determine where the browser needed to advance. The browser had to be secure. If it weren’t safe, it would open these cloud services to attack. It had to protect the user from himself, so he didn’t become his own security problem. It had to better integrate with Microsoft’s productivity suite, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). This result is because that was initially where the user was going to see the most value from synergy with Microsoft’s other products. Finally, it had to be efficient so that people would see the unique value and gravitate to it.

And against this template, Microsoft executed.

New Chromium Edge Features

If I were to rank the enhancements, securing the user would come out on top. It has enhanced tracking prevention and an integrated private search feature that automatically obfuscates your browser history. It gets an enhanced password monitor that automatically executes when you use autofill. If your password(s) is on the dark web, it will alert you to the problem and then take you to the site to reset your password.

From a productivity standpoint, when you cut and paste from the browser into Microsoft 365, formatting is preserved (called Smart Copy), so you don’t have to reformat lists or tables. Besides, it has a vertical tab feature so that rather than a bunch of hard to manage tabs, you get a far more in-depth and more detailed result. And you can collect sites you’ve discovered into groupings, called “Collections,” so that you can more easily move between them when working on a project. It is like favorites but with pictures and more in-depth descriptions so you can more easily re-find those things you’ve already found.

The Immersive Reader is an exciting new feature that focuses the user on the text, removing distractions. Designed for those with attention issues, this could be a game-changer for people with difficulty concentrating.

Video is enhanced through the browser as well with 4K capability and Dolby Audio, though; granted, you’ll need a 4K display and decent speakers to appreciate this upgrade.

Wrapping Up

Your browser is one of the most used tools in your tool kit, and using the best one should make a significant impact on your productivity. Of these additions, security is by far the most important, but the ability to more efficiently manage your tabs and favorites will be well-received as well. Given most of this will roll out while we are all mostly locked up in our homes, it should provide some additional entertainment, because you will now have an incentive to go and check your settings to see if one of them magically became available.

The days of taking your browser for granted are over, and that is a good thing. If you want more details on any of these features, you can find it here. Have fun, and please stay safe out there.

Rob Enderle is a principal at Enderle Group. He is a nationally recognized analyst and a longtime contributor to QuinStreet publications and Pund-IT.

The post Microsoft’s Updated Chromium Edge Browser: Solution, Not Just a Feature appeared first on eWEEK.

Company description: Intellectus Statistics is cloud-based statistical analysis software that allows users to conduct analyses without requiring statistical expertise. The output is in the form of plain English sentences, formatted in the APA style, to make understanding statistical results easier than ever.

[Editor’s note: APA Style is a writing style and format for academic documents such as scholarly journal articles and books. It is described in the style guide of the American Psychological Association (APA), which is titled the “Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.”]

Intellectus Statistics is a patented statistics platform that enables users to easily conduct statistical analyses, then provides in-depth, interpreted output in seconds. The main market is education, and secondarily, survey companies, and health, education and market research companies.

Intellectus is a privately held company, in business since 2012 and based in Palm Harbor, Fla.  Dr. James Lani is the CEO.

Products and Services  

Intellectus Statistics consists of one platform with seven distinct parts:

1. an Interactive Decision-tree helps the user decide which of 25 statistical tests is the correct analyses based on the type of question they are asking;
2. Data Analysis plan offers 38 downloadable data analysis plans that include assumptions and references;
3. the downloadable Power Analysis feature provides over 50 statistical power analyses to help the user decide what the appropriate sample size should be for each a small, medium, and large effect size;
4. Management function allows users to easily impute data, remove multivariate and univariate outliers, transform or bin data, and other data management tasks;
5. the Plots function allows users to create a scatterplot, bubble plot, histogram, line plot, profile plot, bar plot, pie chart, box plot, and control charts.  The control charts are unique in that the program interprets the plot based on Joint Commission and six other rulesets;
6. the Analyses function allows users to select over 60 different statistical analyses.  For each analysis, the assumptions are automatically preloaded, the assumptions and findings are interpreted in plain English prose, and associated tables and figures are presented as well; and
7. the Projects function allows for uploading of data from numerous sources, and the Share feature permits real-time collaboration of a project(s). 

Key Features

Interprets output in English prose; interprets control charts, preloads and interprets assumptions of analyses, preloads and interprets post-hoc tests, creates APA tables, built-in power analysis, interactive decision tree, share feature to easily collaborate, glossary of terms and symbols, APA references for in-text citations.

Insight and Analysis

There is little general analysis of Intellectus available at this time; however, there are some scholarly papers for educational use cases that discuss the technology, such as this one by  Allen C. Chen, Sabrina Moran, Yuting Sun and Kim-Phuong L. Vu and presented at the International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics in 2018.

Usability compared to other applications is considered a plus for Intellectus. Here is a selection from the summary of the report: “The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of using IS and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to conduct and interpret analyses. An output presented in narrative format could be beneficial to students learning statistics who may have difficulty interpreting results. Overall, accuracy scores and time on task for the two software were not significantly different. Perceived usability and ease of use ratings for IS were significantly higher compared to SPSS. On the other hand, ratings of perceived usefulness were not significantly different between the two software. Results also suggested that participants preferred IS and felt more confident in conducting statistical analyses when using the software. Though there was no significant difference in task accuracy between the two software, data-to-text output helped students with interpreting assumptions for analyses and formatting written results.”

List of current customers: California State University Fullerton, Arizona State University, SUNY, Arkansas State University, Grand Canyon University, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of Maryland, University of Louisiana Lafayette.

Other key players in this market:  SPSS, R, SAS

Delivery: SAAS (software as a service)

Pricing: Academic six-month and annual subscriptions and annual subscriptions for non-profits, commercial, and government use.  For pricing, call 888-383-6639or email James@IntellectusStatistics.com.

Contact information for potential customers:  James@IntellectusStatistics.com; www.IntellectusStatistics.com, 888-383-6639

eWEEK is building an IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.

The post Intellectus Statistics: Product Overview and Insight appeared first on eWEEK.

Company description: Elastic is a search company. When you hail a ride home from work with Uber, Elastic helps power the systems that locate nearby riders and drivers. When you shop online at Walgreens, Elastic helps power finding the right products to add to your cart. When you look for a partner on Tinder, Elastic helps power the algorithms that guide you to a match. When you search across Adobe’s millions of assets, Elastic helps power finding the right photo, font, or color palette to complete your project.

As Sprint operates its nationwide network of mobile subscribers, Elastic helps power the logging of billions of events per day to track and manage website performance issues and network outages. As SoftBank monitors the usage of thousands of servers across its entire IT environment, Elastic helps power the processing of terabytes of daily data in real time. 

In terms of offerings, Elastic delivers technology that enables users to search through massive amounts of structured and unstructured data for a wide range of consumer and enterprise applications. The company’s primary offering is the Elastic Stack, a powerful set of software products that ingest and store data from any source and in any format and perform search, analysis and visualization in milliseconds or less. The Elastic Stack is designed for direct use by developers to power a variety of use cases. Elastic has also built software solutions on the Elastic Stack that address a wide variety of use cases, including app search, site search, enterprise search, logging, metrics, APM, business analytics and security analytics. These products are used by individual developers and organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries.

Elastic was founded in 2012 by Shay Banon, who currently serves as CEO, along with Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness and Simon Willnauer in Amsterdam. The company is distributed with offices all around the world. Elastic went public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 201 under the ESTC ticker. 

Markets: Elastic’s products are used by companies in most industries, including technology, healthcare, financial services, government, telecom, media, retail, transportation and higher education.

International Operations: Elastic has offices and employees around the world, including Amsterdam, Austin, Berlin, Chicago, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, London, Munich, New York, Paris, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. Elastic has customers in over 80 countries.

Product and Services

Elasticsearch is the heart of the Elastic Stack, where users store, search. analyze data.

Kibana is the user interface for the Elastic Stack. It allows users to manage the Elastic Stack and visualize data. Additionally, the user interfaces for many Elastic solutions are built into Kibana.

Beats and Logstash are data ingestion tools that enable users to collect and enrich any kind of data from any source for storage in Elasticsearch. Beats are lightweight agents purpose-built for collecting data on devices, servers and inside containers. Logstash is a dynamic data collection pipeline with an extensible plugin ecosystem.

Additionally, Elastic offers a series of solutions:

The specialized website crawler built into Elastic Site Search enables anyone to easily add search to their website Elastic Site Search also offers an interface for search analytics and tuning relevance to match user behavior and expectations.

Search capabilities and simple APIs serve as the foundation for integrating connectors and crawlers for data sources commonly used by enterprises, such as shared drives and other collaboration and document sharing offerings. 

Elastic APM includes agents for common programming frameworks and an APM Server designed for scalable collection and processing of metrics coming from APM agents. It includes an interface supporting custom visualizations for waterfall transactionviews and code-level visibility into application performance.

These solutions come with pre-built configurations making it easy to useBeats and Logstash to ingest the appropriate type of data. They also include default Kibana searches, dashboards and visualizations to deliver instant insights.

Key Features

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine capable of solving a growing number of use cases. The heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores data so users can discover the expected and uncover the unexpected. Elasticsearch enables users to perform and combine many types of searches — structured, unstructured, geo, metric. It’s one thing to find the 10 best documents to match a query. But how does someone make sense of, say, a billion log lines? Elasticsearch aggregations let users zoom out to explore trends and patterns in their data.

Kibana is a visualization tool to help users configure and manage all aspects of the Elastic Stack. Kibana core ships with histograms, line graphs, pie charts, sunbursts and more. Users can also use Vega grammar to design their own visualizations. All leverage the full aggregation capabilities of Elasticsearch. 

Logstash is an open-source data collection engine with real-time pipelining capabilities. Logstash can dynamically unify data from disparate sources and normalize the data into destinations of a user’s choice. 

While Logstash originally drove innovation in log collection, its capabilities extend well beyond that use case. Any type of event can be enriched and transformed with a broad array of input, filter and output plugins, with many native codecs further simplifying the ingestion process. Logstash accelerates insights by harnessing a greater volume and variety of data.

Beats is a platform for lightweight shippers that send data from edge machines to Logstash and Elasticsearch.

Insight and Analysis

Here is a professional’s review posted on IT Central Station in 2019:

Overall comment: “We use this solution to collect log data and analyze it. We have an on-premises deployment.”

What is most valuable? “The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me. As a system, it is easy to use.”

What needs improvement? “This is not a robust system, so in terms of resilience, they have to make some improvements. From time to time the system goes down and we have to start again, after adjusting some configuration parameters. Technical support can be improved. The interface would be improved with the inclusion of dashboards to assist in analyzing problems because it is very difficult. Better dashboards or a better configuration system would be very good.”

For how long have I used the solution? “I have been using this solution for six months.”

What do I think about the stability of the solution? “This is not exactly a stable solution, which is why we are considering another compatible tool, and whether we go on with Elasticsearch or change it.”

How are customer service and technical support? “I follow their forum and blogs, and I have also asked questions directly to their technical department. I would say that support is moderate. It is not very good or very bad, but in between.”

Which solution did I use previously, and why did I switch? “We did not use another solution prior to this one.”

How was the initial setup? “The initial setup of this solution is easy and straightforward. The deployment is both easy and quick.”

What about the implementation team? “We have an in-house team that handles deployment. Two people are enough for deployment and maintenance.”

What other advice do I have? “My advice for anybody considering this solution is that it is an easy to use tool, but for work that is not complex. If on the other hand, the work is more complex, with more data and perhaps a clustering environment, then they may have to consider something more stable and more robust. I would rate this solution a seven out of 10.”

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Here is a professional’s review posted on Gartner Peer Reviews in 2019:

Overall comment: “Elasticsearch, logstash, and kibana provide an excellent stack for log analysis, application monitoring, and much more. While you get most features on the free tier, the most important features are reserves for their paid tiers.”

Please explain the business problems or needs that prompted the purchase of this product or service. “Way too many websites to effectively look at logs during a time of duress on a server. The log analysis functionality has saved many many hours of effort in combing logs for potential issues.”

What do you like most about the product or service? “The flexibility of the elk stack is one of its greatest attributes. With the addition of beats you can write a plugin to basically do whatever you want.”

What do you dislike most about the product or service? “The pricing model is awful. They force you into a managed service and if you dont have 13K+ to spend you are SOL. In addition to the unfair pricing model, upgrades can be dicey. Configuration options that worked for years may break, new features may explode old features. They have upgrade assistants built in which helps, but the fact that they need to include upgrade assistants speaks for itself.”

If you could start over, what would your organization do differently? “Probably would back off on the roll out of the service given some of the core features we ended up needing were locked to high priced license tiers.”

What one piece of advice would you give other prospective customers? “Deeply consider Apache solr before diving into ELK. Consider the data you are planning to ingest, total size, how often it will get searched, etc., and plan your resources accordingly. Also the whole 3 node cluster, while elastic says it is best practice, is kinda false. It will run just fine on a single node for smaller workloads. We process about 20-50 GB of data a day and have had no instances of data loss caused by running on a single node. Obviously you will lose some data during upgrades but I am happy to pay that price over the cost of running 3+ nodes.”

———————————————————

List of current customers: Microsoft, Netflix, Verizon, Airbus, Home Depot, Mayo Clinic, JPL NASA, eBay and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Delivery: The Elastic Stack and the Elastic solutions generally can be deployed on premises, in public or private clouds, or in hybrid environments, to satisfy various user and customer needs. Elastic’s goal is to ultimately offer all of its products as both self-managed and SaaS deployments.

Elastic has developed a family of SaaS products called Elastic Cloud, including Elasticsearch Service, Elastic Site Search Service and Elastic App Search Service. Elastic hosts and manages its Elastic Cloud products on infrastructure from multiple public cloud providers, including Google Cloud, Alibaba and Tencent.

Pricing

Pricing info can be found here: https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch/service/pricing. Elastic sales can also be reached at (650) 458-2625.

Other key players in this market:

Contact information for potential customers: https://www.elastic.co/contact

800 West El Camino Real, Suite 350
Mountain View, Calif. 94040
General +1 650 458 2620
Sales +1 650 458 2625

info@elastic.co  |  sales@elastic.co

eWEEK is building a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market. 

The post Elastic NV Search: Product Overview and Insight appeared first on eWEEK.

Company description: Lexalytics processes billions of unstructured text documents every day, globally. Lexalytics solutions are built from the ground up to solve the specific challenges involved in analyzing text data. The company’s Salience, Semantria and Lexalytics Intelligence Platform products combine natural language processing with artificial intelligence to transform unstructured text into usable data. Lexalytics products can be deployed on premise, in the cloud or within hybrid infrastructure.

Lexalytics connects to customers’ internal and external databases, warehouses and firehoses to reveal contextual patterns and insights within comments, reviews, articles, emails, survey responses, contracts and other unstructured text documents. Data analytics companies and enterprise data analyst teams rely on Lexalytics to build better analytics products and deliver clear, useful recommendations to engineering, marketing, PR and support teams.

Lexalytics solutions form the backbone of business intelligence programs around the world in a range of industries, including voice of customer, customer experience management, survey analysis, market research, social listening, news monitoring, brand management, voice of employee and workforce analytics. Lexalytics was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Boston, with additional offices throughout the U.S. and Canada. (Twitter: @Lexalytics). The CEO of Lexalytics is Jeff Catlin (Twitter: @jeff_catlin).

Markets:

• CPG/Retail
• Pharma/Healthcare/Biotech
• Hospitality:Travel/Tourism, Airlines, Airports, Hotels, Restaurants
• Technology
• Entertainment
• Marketing: Market Research, Press Relations, Analyst Relations, Consumer Analytics
• Financial Services: Retail Banking, Hedge Funds, Commodities, Private Equity
• Cosmetics
• Agrichemicals

International operations:  Montreal, Canada

Product and Services

Salience: Salience is a text analytics engine and set of text analytics libraries which are integrated into existing customer or BI applications on-premises or in other applications to gain insights from a company’s unstructured data.

Key Features:

• Sentiment Analysis
• Named Entity Extraction
• Theme Extraction
• Categorization
• Intention Analysis
• Summarization
• Low-level NLP functions (Tokenization, Part-of-Speech Tagging, etc)
• 20+ Languages
• Pre-Built Industry Configurations

Delivery:  Integrated into other applications as OEM software libraries – cloud or on-premise

Pricing:  Subscription model based on number of processing cores.  Sold in 8-core blocks.  Each core can process approx. 200 Twitter-sized messages/second.  Pricing varies by number of cores, time-of-subscription, site-license, etc.  Please contact sales@lexalytics.com for specifics, or call +1-800-377-8036

Semantria: Semantria wraps the text analytics and natural language processing features of the Salience engine into a RESTful API with graphical configuration tools and software necessary for a web service. Data analytics companies integrate Semantria to add customizable natural language processing functionalities, while enterprise data analyst teams and consultancies connect Semantria to their preferred business intelligence tools to gain context-rich insights distilled from unstructured text data.

Features:

• Sentiment Analysis
• Named Entity Extraction
• Theme Extraction
• Categorization
• Intention Analysis
• Summarization
• Low-level NLP functions (Tokenization, Part-of-Speech Tagging, etc)
• 20+ Languages
• Pre-Built Industry Configurations
• Graphical Configuration System

Delivery: Software as a service, can be deployed behind customer firewall (on-premise), or in any cloud model, including using our public cloud service.

Pricing: Subscription model based on number of documents processed/month, size of documents, complexity of configuration, custom features like custom machine learning models, languages, industry configurations.  Please call +1-800-377-8036 for specifics.

Semantria for Excel: Semantria for Excel is a customer experience management and survey analysis add-in for Microsoft Excel. Semantria for Excel provides easy analysis of free-text survey responses, tweets and reviews, and other feedback sources.  

Features:

• Sentiment Analysis
• Named Entity Extraction
• Theme Extraction
• Categorization
• Intention Analysis
• Summarization
• 20+ Languages
• Pre-Built Industry Configurations
• Complete integration with Excel

Delivery:  Software as a service, can be deployed behind customer firewall (on-premise), or in any cloud model, including using our public cloud service.

Pricing:  Subscription model based on # of documents processed/month, size of documents, complexity of configuration, custom features like custom machine learning models, languages, industry configurations.  Please contact sales@lexalytics.com for specifics, or call +1-800-377-8036

Lexalytics Intelligence Platform: The Lexalytics Intelligence Platform is a complete business intelligence tool for data analyst teams with significant text analysis problems. The platform provides all the features necessary to gather, process, analyze and visualize text data in all its forms: integrated and custom data connectors, feature-rich natural language processing, easy configuration tools, intuitive analytics dashboards, and more.

Features:

• Sentiment Analysis
• Named Entity Extraction
• Theme Extraction
• Categorization
• Intention Analysis
• Summarization
• 20+ Languages
• Pre-Built Industry Configurations
• Data Connectors
• Data Storage
• Dashboards optimized for communicating stories from text analysis

Delivery:  Software as a service, can be deployed behind customer firewall (on-premise), or in any cloud model, including using our public cloud service.

Pricing:  Subscription model based on number of documents processed/month, size of documents, complexity of configuration, custom features like custom machine learning models, languages, industry configurations, dashboards, data connections.  Please call +1-800-377-8036 for specifics.

Data Extraction Services for Semi-Structured Documents: Data Extraction Services for Semi-Structured Documents combines Lexalytics’ leading NLP technologies with the ability to classify both structured and unstructured content to gain more insights and value from corporate documents. Data Extraction Services significantly reduces the time and labor costs of document data analysis and extraction, while improving the accuracy and insights available within the data.

Features

• Analyzes and structures documents from virtually any format, including PDF, TXT, XML, HTML and Word, and then exports into standard ERP systems and Excel

Delivery:  Available as professional services and requires a license for Lexalytics Salience, Semantria, or Lexalytics Intelligence Platform.

Pricing:Professional services engagement, so, pricing depends completely on complexity of documents to be analyzed. Contact +1-800-377-8036.

Insight and Analysis

From a professional on Gartner Peer Reviews (2018): Overall comment: “Pros:  1. Initially it looks complex to configure but with gradual efforts, we are able to understand the complexities and it is smooth now. 2. Does the work. We use it to perform the categorization of text based on pre-defined dictionary.”

Cons: 1. “Onboarding a new customer and giving complete overview of services etc. are very poor. That needs improvement. 2. Categorization of text is based on key words and few settings around key words. This can also be implemented easily using database or programming language. There is nothing new and niche.”

What do you like most about the product or service?: “Utilizing our own configuration for text categorization. Its giving flexibility.”

What do you dislike most about the product or service? “All key words given for categorization are matched exactly. There should be a way where synonyms, lemmatization should also help in identifying the correct category and which is not happening at this time.” (Lemmatization usually refers to doing things properly with the use of a vocabulary and morphological analysis of words, normally aiming to remove inflectional endings only and to return the base or dictionary form of a word, which is known as the lemma.)

From a professional on G2 Crowd reviews (2018): What do you like best?  “I evaluated seven sentiment vendors, and found Semantria to be the best at scoring sentiment. This was for retail. In addition, I like that you can adjust the phrases to score the sentiment more positive or negative. Some phrases are clearly negative for some industries. The word “honor,” for example, may be deemed a positive word, but for retail, it’s often in a negative context. With this engine, you can push this phrase along with another words that are within X proximity to be more negative. For example, “honor your price matching!” Or , “honor your agreements!”, is often customers complaining in retail and you can polarize that to be more negative. I think their sentiment scoring is more accurate than their competitors.

What do you dislike? “The phrase/entity engine needs to be built out more.”

eWEEK aggregate score: 4.7/5.0

List of current customers: Cision, Hootsuite, Cisco, KPMG Nunwood, Biogen, Revinate, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Trendkite, Waggener Edstrom, Voziq, Gensler

Other key players in this market: IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Luminoso, Clarabridge, Stanford NLP, Basis Technology

Contact information for potential customers: 1-617-249-1049

eWEEK is building a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.

The post Lexalytics: Product Overview and Insight appeared first on eWEEK.

The IT world was different back then, largely proprietary, and as such it was fighting the core concept of massive interoperability that the Web promised. Even though the browser was mostly free (something that Netscape seemed unable to figure out, to its own detriment), firms fought over unique aspects of them, creating significant compatibility problems for web developers.

Well, there is no bigger example of that world being dead than this week’s announcement of the Microsoft Edge Chromium browser for Apple. I think it is a game-changer, and here is why.

Edge on Chromium

I’ve been on the Edge Chromium Browser for Windows for some time now, and it has become my default browser. It blends the compatibility benefits of Google Chrome with the legacy benefits of Edge, so that this is now, in my experience, the closest thing to a universal browser in the market.

On first load, it reminds me a bit of my first experience on Firefox, when I was amazed about how quickly it would launch web pages. It made old Edge feel ancient and even seemed to outperform the Chrome browser on my system. It also appears to address some of the unique compatibility issues that forced me to occasionally use the Firefox or Opera browsers.

It has had, during patches and updates, some issues mostly with conferencing products such as Cisco WebEx that have cropped up during updates, but it otherwise has been an impressively good browser–particularly because it is a blend of Microsoft and Google technology.

But allowing the browser to move to Apple’s platform opens an interesting new aspect for this offering.

Edge on Chromium for Apple

When I first heard that Microsoft was adapting the Chromium platform for Edge, I had to quickly check to see if the date was April 1, because it could only be a prank. But, as noted above, it wasn’t, and the result is impressive.

To go the extra yard and make the platform OS independent and allowing it to initially embrace Apple’s operating systems creates another interesting dynamic. Not only will you now have what is basically a universal standard on interoperability with Chromium across all the major OSs, but this Microsoft browser will be able to focus more on unique features rather than just mucking with the plumbing and creating compatibility issues for those of us trying to get our websites to work.

The result is effectively a common browser standard across all major platforms (porting this to Android and Chrome given its Chromium roots should be rather easy). So, we are back to the potential of one browser standard.

The Big Cloud Impact

Now what this potentially gives us, in effect, is a common platform for all PCs and smartphones. As we move to web services like the Windows Virtual Desktop our applications will increasingly run remotely and be accessed through this common browser. This means regardless of whether you are on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android or Chrome, you should increasingly get the same user experience on the growing number of hosted desktop applications.  In effect, this becomes the other side of Azure, and because Microsoft owns Azure, it should result in a competitive advantage for that cloud platform in terms of interoperability.

Wrapping Up

I just can’t get over how big a Microsoft Edge browser based on Google’s Chromium platform running on Apple operating systems is. The implication is a new standard platform upon which products such as Windows Virtual Desktop and any hosted application could run. As we move to 5G and bandwidths improve, the momentum to doing everything in the cloud will increase, and this new browser, eventually running on all major platforms, has a good shot at again becoming the de facto standard browser.

Microsoft got here the first time by being highly proprietary and using its market muscle, coupled with a timely Netscape failure, to own the market. What is interesting is that this time they are getting there through standards and voluntary interoperation. I don’t think there is a bigger or better example of how much Microsoft has changed, and how much the market is changing, than this offering.  It still kind of blows my mind.

Rob Enderle is a principal analyst with the Enderle Group and a regular contributor to eWEEK and other QuinStreet Inc. publications.

The post Why Microsoft Chromium Edge Browser for Apple is a Major Development appeared first on eWEEK.

That’s what it looks like in the wake of the Google Cloud Next conference, and yesterday’s news of former Oracle executive and current Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian welcoming the former cloud chief of SAP, Robert Enslin, to Google Cloud.

The traditional enterprise software axis of Oracle and SAP has infiltrated Google, which until now was known as a technology powerhouse that was lacking in enterprise chops.

Google thought that VMware veteran Diane Greene, who came to Google in late 2015, could bring Google Cloud up to the level of the competition. Greene made some significant strides in focusing Google’s product offering, but the cloud business was not gaining ground on AWS or Azure in the category that matters most—enterprise customers.

Kurian’s Mission: To Better Commercialize Google Cloud

Kurian, of course, created a stir last fall by abruptly leaving Oracle, where he was the chief executive in charge of cloud and software under Larry Ellison. Originally Kurian announced he was taking a leave of absence, but soon after it was announced he’d been hired as Google Cloud CEO.

One of the first things Kurian did was bring on his former No. 2 at Oracle, Amit Zavery, as Head of Platform for Google Cloud. As Executive Vice President at Oracle, Zavery oversaw Oracle Cloud Platform (PaaS), middleware, analytics and Java.

The Enslin move solidifies the strategy of bringing enterprise experience to Google. The new President of Global Customer Operations will look to continue to build out solutions for enterprises, with a special focus on vertical industries—a topic that Kurian hit on during his Next keynotes last week. He announced many new large customers from retail, finance, media, manufacturing, logistics and transportation.

Key partners said Google is finally on the right track with cloud, marrying technology with business solutions.

“Google still needs to develop a level of sophistication about the enterprise, but it has made big inroads so far and are well on their way,” said Ajit Thomas, managing director, Accenture Google Cloud Business Group, in an interview with eWEEK. “The good thing is Kurian is investing in people for facing off against clients. That’s very healthy, and we are seeing that mentality accelerate through the company. And with lots of new customers, anchored by vertical industries, they are picking their spots on where to win in the enterprise.”

A Cloud Built for the Enterprise

On the product side, Google took two big steps in enabling customers to harness Google’s technology more easily and effectively. It announced Anthos, a Kubernetes-based platform for enabling true write-once, run-anywhere portability for container-based applications in any cloud and on premise. Also, the company has made working with AI even easier with the AI Hub, a collaboration tool for developers, data scientists and DevOps administrators.

Google can no longer rely on the power of its in-house tech to win the cloud wars. One of Google’s problems all along has been that many of its cloud products are based on applications Google built to support its own advertising and search business, yet there are few customers in the world who can use these tools the way Google can.

Two examples of that are the container orchestrator Kubernetes (originally conceived as “Borg”) and the Spanner distributed database. Kubernetes has spawned a large and vibrant community to make it easier to use and integrate. Meanwhile, startup Cockroach Labs took the concept of Spanner and built a version of it that can be deployed on other clouds and on premise.

“Our founders came from Google and saw a need for a broader commercial version of big data problems that [Google] was solving for themselves with Spanner,” said Kurt Heinemann, Chief Marketing Officer

of Cockroach Labs. “Spanner was built with Google’s needs first and then commercialized. We built around the absolute needs of the customer, with cloud neutrality and data locality with CockroachDB.”

Google Cloud Not for Everybody–Yet

When Greene hosted the first Google Cloud Next conferences, she told attendees that she wanted the Google Cloud to be their cloud, too. As we have seen, Google’s Cloud is not for everybody.

It will be a fine line Google continues to walk between running its own business while developing cloud products and services for the enterprise. But if Kurian’s enterprise vision is a success, then Google Cloud will be part of a new three-horse race in the cloud.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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