Recent Posts by Alan Zeichick

The Mutua Madrid Open tennis tournament scores points and engages fans with an intelligent chatbot. By Alan Zeichick January/February 2019 Deuce. Advantage. Match point. What will happen next? Thrilling action—and the best players in the world—await tennis fans at the Mutua Madrid Open tournament each year. On the court, spectators watch players such as Rafael Nadal and Simona Halep battle for supremacy. Off the court, there’s MatchBot, an innovative chatbot that helps everyone...

Charles Nutter remembers when, working as a Java architect, he attended a conference and saw the Ruby programming language for the first time. And he was blown away. “I was just stunned that I understood every piece of code, every example, without knowing the language at all,” recalls Nutter. “It was super easy for me to understand the code.” As a Java developer, Nutter began looking for an existing way to run Ruby within a Java runtime environment, specifically a Java virtual...

The university built the chatbot using the intelligent bot capability in Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise. By Alan Zeichick October 3, 2018 In Australia, at 8 a.m. on ‘Results Day,’ thousands and thousands of South Australian year 12 students receive their ATAR (Australia Tertiary Admissions Rank)—the all-important standardized score used to gain admission to universities across Australia. The frustrating challenge: many are eligible to add as many as nine school...

Simplified Java coding. Less garbage. Faster programs. Those are among the key features in the newly released Java 10, which arrived in developers’ hands only six months after the debut of Java 9 in September. This pace is a significant change from Java’s previous cycle of one large release every two to three years. With its faster release cadence, Java is poised to provide developers with innovations twice every year, making the language and platform more attractive and...

In today’s world of interlocked companies and IT service providers, it’s standard practice for a company to ask its tech suppliers to fill out detailed questionnaires about their security practices. Companies use that information when choosing a supplier. Too much is at stake, in terms of company reputation and customer trust, to be anything but thorough with information security. But how can a company’s IT security teams be most effective in that technology buying process?...

No doubt you’ve at least heard about blockchain, the distributed digital ledger technology that lets participants add and view blocks of transaction records, but not delete or change them without being detected. Most of us know blockchain as the foundation of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. But blockchain is starting to enter the business mainstream as the trusted ledger for farm-to-table vegetable tracking, real estate transfers, digital identity management, financial...

Blockchain is a secure system for conducting trustworthy transactions with customers, partners, and competitors. By Alan Zeichick March/April 2018 Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger technology in which blocks of transaction records can be added and viewed—but can’t be deleted or changed without detection. Here’s where the name comes from: a blockchain is an ever-growing sequential chain of transaction records, clumped together into blocks. There’s no central repository of...

Artificial intelligence is rewriting the enterprise technology landscape. Here’s what you can do now, and what you will be able to do soon. By Alan Zeichick January/February 2018 When the little wireless speaker in your kitchen acts on your request to add chocolate milk to your shopping list, there’s artificial intelligence (AI) working, in the cloud, to understand your speech, determine what you want to do, and carry out the instruction. When you send a text message to your HR...

(Originally published on Forbes) Humans can't keep up. At least, not when it comes to meeting the rapidly expanding challenges inherent to enterprise cybersecurity. There are too many devices, too many applications, too many users, and too many megabytes of log files for humans to make sense of it all. Moving forward, effective cybersecurity is going to be a "Battle of the Bots," or to put it less dramatically, machine versus machine. That's the message Oracle Executive...