ReadWriteEnterprise

"You can't always get what you want" is literally the theme of this year's RSA Security conference in San Francisco. "With increased speed and cunning, hackers are taking advantage of the openness of today's infrastructures," said EMC's executive vice president Art Coviello, Jr. And exacerbating the problem, he said, is the fact that despite openness and open architectures, people aren't banding together for solutions.

This at a conference that officially opened Tuesday morning to a gospel choir prophesying the coming of the age of Getting What You Need. Hopefully Aretha Franklin received a cut of the royalties when one soloist, breaking from script, sang her original lyrics instead of the ones inscribed on the big-screen closed caption: "I-N-F-O-S-E-C, find out what it means to me."

VMware announced today that it will acquire Socialcast, an enterprise microblogging and social network software-as-a-service. The move expands VMware's software-as-a-service portfolio, which also includes Zimbra, Mozy and SlideRocket. VMware is owned by EMC.

EMC World is taking place in Las Vegas today. In addition to the announcement of EMC's own Apache Hadoop appliance and distribution, several other companies have announced new products ranging from software integration tools to storage appliances.

We've covered the increasing competition and innovation in the Hadoop market, and those trends show no signs of slowing down.

Earlier today we told you about how the Hadoop business is heating up. Hadoop isn't a database, but Hbase and its alternatives are a core part of the platform. IBM is offering Hadoop products, and EMC is making an announcement next month. Microsoft has its own alternative, Azure Table Storage.

Meanwhile, the columnar database market has been rapidly converging. in the past year, EMC acquired Greenplum; IBM acquired Netezza; SAP acquired Sybase; HP acquired Vertica; and Teradata acquired AsterData.