Business Intelligence and Analytics Articles
New releases of the Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Big Data Connectors are now available. Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 is an engineered system of hardware and software that has been upgraded to include Intel's new processors and the latest release (4.1) of Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager, as well as the new Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-in for Big Data Appliance.
Posted December 18, 2012
The University of Minnesota, a top research institution comprised of five campuses, 65,000 students and 25,000 employees, has made systematic changes and improved database administration efficiency with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. By hosting its IT environment on two Oracle Exadata Database Machine half racks, the university consolidated more than 200 Oracle database instances into fewer than 20, enabling it to reduce data center floor space and total cost of ownership.
Posted December 12, 2012
At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual conference for customers and partners, John Matelski, president of the IOUG, and CIO for Dekalb County, Georgia, gave his perspective on the key takeaways from this year's event. Matelski also described the user group's efforts to help the community understand the value of Oracle's engineered systems and deal with the broad implications of big data, and how the IOUG is supporting Oracle DBAs in their evolving roles.
Posted December 12, 2012
Progress Software, a provider of software for connecting business applications to data and services, has released DataDirect Connect and DataDirect Connect XE for ODBC 7.1. The releases provide fast, reliable, secure and scalable connectivity for Apache Hive, as well as expanded support for cloud databases including Microsoft SQL Azure. DataDirect Connect and DataDirect Connect XE for ODBC 7.1 also offer new features for IBM DB2 10.1, IBM DB2 pureScale 9.8, Teradata 14, and Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Posted December 11, 2012
Yellowfin, a business intelligence vendor, has released Storyboard, a new presentation and collaboration platform for BI that offers a fully integrated and interactive presentation module for BI content. Storyboard's user interface allows BI insights to be intuitively incorporated into businesses' decision-making process and empowers business users to collaborate and benefit from BI.
Posted December 11, 2012
HP announced a range of new enhancements to its Converged Storage portfolio, intended to address storage management issues within virtualized, cloud and big data archive environments. The refresh of the company's storage portfolio includes new HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreAll Storage, and HP StoreOnce Backup product offerings. With the understanding that the storage sprawl at many organizations is unsustainable, the goal of the updated HP storage portfolio is to simplify the overall experience within customer environments, Craig Nunes, vice president of worldwide marketing, HP Storage, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 10, 2012
While no one can dispute the importance of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to organizational performance and competitiveness, executives in charge of these systems are under intense pressure to stay within or trim budgets. Close to half of the executives in a new survey say they have held off on new upgrades for at least a few years. In the meantime, at least one out of four enterprises either are scaling back or have had to scale back their recent ERP projects due to budget constraints.
Posted December 06, 2012
Kore Technologies has announced KommerceServer Mobile Edition, providing the capabilities of KommerceServer webStoreFront and webPortal in a compact mobile package. The new mobile edition is intended to be a complement to Kore customers' corporate websites. The mobile edition enables end users to browse a company web catalog, make online purchases, and access their account histories using a streamlined interface designed for the requirements and workflow of the mobile user.
Posted December 06, 2012
Actian Corporation and Versant Corporation, both real-time information management software providers, have announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement through which Actian will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Versant for $13 per share in cash for a purchase price of approximately $37 million. Versant's board of directors unanimously approved the Actian acquisition agreement.
Posted December 04, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has officially launched Attunity CloudBeam, a fully-managed data transfer SaaS platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3). With its beta completed, the high-performance data transfer solution was unveiled and demonstrated live at the AWS re: Invent Customer and Partner Conference from in Las Vegas, NV. "This is aimed at folks today that are using AWS or will be using AWS for all kinds of use cases where data is core to their strategy," Matt Benati, vice president of Global Marketing at Attunity, tells DBTA. "All these use cases demand the movement of data and it really has to be a frictionless movement of data at scale. That is what Attunity does best."
Posted December 04, 2012
At SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd co-located in Madrid earlier this month, SAP announced new solutions leveraging the SAP HANA platform. The new solutions aim to enable real-time planning, reporting and analysis on large-scale volumes of data, new sense-and-respond scenarios and personalized interactions with consumers.
Posted November 28, 2012
In-memory technology provider Terracotta, Inc. has announced that javax.cache, a caching standard for Java applications, has entered Draft Review Stage under the Java Community Process. It provides a standard approach for how Java applications temporarily cache data, an essential technology for in-memory solutions and a critical factor in achieving high performance and scalability of big data.
Posted November 27, 2012
Business analytics provider Birst Inc. has released the second version of Birst Mobile for the iPad, a native iOS application that offers easy access to reports and charts and enhanced business intelligence dashboards. Taking full advantage of Apple's gesture-based user interface, Birst Mobile provides information management, reporting, ad hoc analysis and dashboard displays via the iPad.
Posted November 27, 2012
Jeff West, president of Quest International Users Group, joined by Jonathan Vaughn, Quest's executive director, talked with DBTA at Oracle OpenWorld about what's ahead for 2013. The group has launched smaller, product-concentrated events to support JD Edwards and PeopleSoft users' specific areas of interest, and expanded its range of online offerings for users who may not be able take advantage of in-person conferences. Plans are underway to help members learn about PeopleSoft 9.2 coming in March and to prepare for the looming end of support for JD Edwards World. As always, says West, Quest continues to help get information to members from Oracle and their peers. "It is always about return on investment and aligning IT with the business. That is always on the top of people's minds."
Posted November 27, 2012
Pentaho Corporation, a business analytics provider, has announced new capabilities in its data integration and business analytics platform, including Instaview, an instant big data discovery application, and Pentaho Mobile for iPad. According to the company, the new capabilities will enable IT developers, data analysts and business users to move from data to decisions more quickly, and are included in the 4.8 release of Pentaho Business Analytics Enterprise Edition.
Posted November 20, 2012
At Enterprise World, OpenText's annual customer conference, the company unveiled OpenText Cloud, which aims to provide all OpenText software as cloud-based offerings, in addition to the existing on-premises products. OpenText provides enterprise information management software that enables companies to manage, secure and leverage their unstructured business information. OpenText Cloud provides customers with anytime, anywhere access to OpenText's EIM solution portfolio in the cloud, including more than 20 ready-to-use applications and services.
Posted November 16, 2012
Real-time operational intelligence provider Splunk has announced the general availability of Splunk Enterprise 5, the latest version of the company's flagship product. The new release includes added features to create a platform for developers building big data applications. "Even as data volume and complexity are growing exponentially, the time people are willing to wait for answers is shrinking," observes Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, Splunk.
Posted November 15, 2012
MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the MapR Distribution for Hadoop, has formed a partnership with Hadapt, which offers a data analytics platform for natively integrating SQL with Apache Hadoop. The partnership enables customers to leverage MapR's Hadoop distribution in conjunction with Hadapt's Interactive Query capabilities to analyze all types of data, structured, semi-structured and unstructured, in a single, enterprise platform. Partnerships such as the one with Hadapt enable a broad community of users to have access to Hadoop data while also leveraging the existing skill sets of those users, Jack Norris, vice president of MapR, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 15, 2012
For years, data warehouses and extract, transform and load (ETL) have been the primary methods of accessing and archiving multiple data sources across enterprises. Now, an emerging approach - data virtualization - promises to advance the concept of the federated data warehouse to deliver more timely and easier-to-access enterprise data. These are some of the observations made at Composite Software's third Annual Data Virtualization Day, held in New York City. This year's gathering was the largest ever, with nearly 250 customers and practitioners in attendance, Composite reports.
Posted November 13, 2012
Entrinsik, Inc., has announced that its Informer self-service reporting and business intelligence software is now listed on SugarCRM'sSugarExchange and can integrate directly with SugarCRM implementations. Through the integration between Entrinsik and SugarCRM, users can log into Sugar and access real-time reporting, data analysis and interactive dashboards. "It allows users to integrate multiple sources of data without even leaving the Sugar instance and without having to set up a separate data store or data cube which they would typically have to do in order to access data from multiple data sources," Sharon Shelton, vice president of marketing at Entrinsik, tells DBTA.
Posted November 13, 2012
Predictive analytics vendor Alpine Data Labs has released Alpine 2.8, the latest version of the company's flagship product that leverages Hadoop and enables enterprises to derive business value from their big data. Alpine 2.8 users can executive analytics on combined data from Hadoop and relational databases from their web browser without any additional investments in hardware or infrastructure.
Posted November 13, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has released Attunity Managed File Transfer (MFT) for Hadoop. The new enterprise data transfer solution is designed to accelerate big data collection processes and integrate them seamlessly into and out of Hadoop. MFT enables organizations to collect and transfer big data in both the cloud and enterprise data centers for strategic initiatives including log and machine-data analytics, business intelligence, and data archiving."Attunity MFT for Hadoop, the first of several Hadoop solutions that Attunity will unveil, is designed to deliver on the great promise of Hadoop by helping organizations achieve faster time-to-value for big data analytics projects," says Matt Benati, VP Global Marketing at Attunity.
Posted November 09, 2012
JackBe, a provider of business Intelligence software, launched Presto 3.5, the latest release of its flagship real-time operational intelligence platform. "The theme around the new release is DIY BI and basically what that means is that we are bringing metrics-driven real-time operational intelligence to front-line decision makers, and we are giving business users more self-service access to real-time KPIs and analytics so they can better assess the business impact of changing conditions as they happen," Elizabeth Edwards, CMO of JackBe, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 07, 2012
Cloudera, provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services, announced the first big data management solution that allows batch and real-time operations on any type of data within one scalable system. Cloudera Enterprise Real-Time Query (RTQ), powered by Cloudera Impala, improves the economics and performance of large scale enterprise data management, allowing organizations to process data at petabyte scale and interact with that data in real time all on the same system.
Posted November 06, 2012
Informatica Corporation has introduced Informatica PowerCenter Big Data Edition, a solution for organizations supplementing transactional data with social, mobile, cloud and machine data at high velocity, volume and variety. PowerCenter Big Data Edition works with emerging technologies like Hadoop as well as traditional data management infrastructure to leverage organizations' big data while reducing costs and risks.
Posted November 06, 2012
Open source software vendor Talend announced that it has added big data profiling for Apache Hadoop and support for NoSQL databases in the upcoming release of its integration platform, Talend v5.2. Data profiling, the process of evaluating the character and condition of data stored across the enterprise, is a critical step toward gaining control over organizational data, and is emerging as a big data best practice. "Profiling allows you to understand what you have in your Hadoop cluster and how this data can be used for your big data integration and management project," Yves de Montcheuil, Talend's vice president of marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 06, 2012
BI Software provider MicroStrategy rolled out MicroStrategy Cloud Express, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed for "do-it-yourself" business analytics, mobile intelligence and data publishing. According to the company, the new solution enables any business person - regardless of technical skill - to access and analyze data on their own, as well as design and share mobile apps data-driven mobile apps without writing code.
Posted November 01, 2012
Mark Clark, president of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), spoke with 5 Minute Briefing at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference about issues facing Oracle Applications users and the OAUG's plans for the year ahead. Helping members understand the significance of the cloud, Fusion applications, and EBS 12.2 are key issues, as the OAUG continues to provide education, networking opportunities, and a voice for members to Oracle, says Clark, who is also a senior partner at O2Works.
Posted October 30, 2012
HiT Software, a provider of data replication and change data capture (CDC) solutions for heterogeneous database environments, has announced the release of DBMoto 7.2, which includes support for the Actian Vectorwise analytical database. "Vectorwise is a leading analytical database that is designed to deliver an incredible speed in returning queries on big data," Carolyn Hughes, director of marketing at HiT Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. In turn, she notes, users also want to be able to get data into Vectorwise at the same level of speed so that their reporting and analytics can be as close to real time as possible. DBMoto captures data from all major relational databases including Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2 (all versions), MySQL, Informix, Sybase and others, and automatically passes data and any updates to Vectorwise.
Posted October 30, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, is partnering with Teradata to offer Attunity Replicate for Teradata, a big data replication solution designed to enable loading of heterogeneous data to Teradata with high performance, efficiency and ease-of-use.
Posted October 25, 2012
Kognitio is allowing companies to download a fully functional copy of its software at no charge, and with no time restrictions. The company, which made the announcement at O'Reilly Strata and Hadoop World conference, said it is offering a full-featured, perpetual use license of up to 128 gigabytes without an expiration period or other limited functions normally found in "trialware." This capability gives companies the ability to do in-memory analytics on, for example, more than 500 million customer records at once.
Posted October 25, 2012
At SAP TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas, SAP unveiled its plans for SAP HANA Cloud, a next-generation cloud platform based on in-memory technology. As part of SAP HANA Cloud, the company also announced the general availability of SAP NetWeaverCloud, an open standards-based application service, and SAP HANA One, a deployment of SAP HANA certified for production use on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, as the first offerings based on SAP HANA Cloud.
Posted October 24, 2012
Platfora has introduced what it describes as the first in-memory business intelligence platform for Hadoop. The company unveiled its product, which is now in beta, at the Strata + Hadoop World Conference in New York. It will go GA in Q1 2013. "There is a lot of excitement out there among our early customers as well as the Hadoop distribution companies and other systems vendors," Ben Werther, founder and CEO, Platfora, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 23, 2012
It is an understatement to say we're witnessing an example of Moore's Law — which states the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years — as we seek to manage the explosion of big data. Given the impact this new wealth of information has on hundreds of millions of business transactions, there's an urgent need to look beyond traditional insight-generation tools and techniques. It's critical we develop new tools and skills to extract the insights that organizations seek through predictive analytics.
Posted October 16, 2012
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 was recently introduced with capabilities for deploying and managing business applications in an enterprise private cloud, such as Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS), enhanced business application management, and integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. According to Oracle, "engineered-together management" is especially important for a consolidation platform such as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, where multiple business applications need to run reliably and securely. In addition, as a result of demand from customers leveraging Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, a new IOUG Management Special Interest Group (SIG) has been created.
Posted October 16, 2012
SAP AG announced the availability of the SAP Precision Retailing solution, which is designed to help companies reach consumers at the moment of decision. The enterprise solution delivers personalized offers and suggestions in real time to consumers across multiple channels, including mobile devices, in-store kiosks and websites. "The solution we just launched bridges the gap between the consumer at the point of decision who needs to make a purchase and the ocean of data - and we extract the needle in the haystack - that piece of information that will help the consumer make a decision," Herve Pluche, vice president, Retail Consumer Mobile Initiative, SAP Labs, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 11, 2012
Composite Software introduced version 6.2 of the Composite Data Virtualization Platform at Data Virtualization Day 2012, its data virtualization conference in New York City. The new release contains additional analytics enablement capabilities including support for more analytic data sources, additional analytic platform optimizations, and expanded data governance. "High-performance access to big data, analytic appliances and data warehouses is far simpler and faster with Composite's data virtualization solution," says Kevin Ott, Composite Software senior VP of product development.
Posted October 10, 2012
CA Technologies launched a new book called "Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated" at Oracle OpenWorld. Co-authored by CA CTO John Michelsen and CA LISA director of product marketing Jason English, the book explains how deploying service virtualization to simulate the behavior, responsiveness and data of dependent systems can help remove constraints in the existing software environment, and help increase the speed, performance, and agility for the development of enterprise application software.
Posted October 10, 2012
Are today's data systems — many of which were built and designed for legacy systems of the past decade — up to the task of moving information to end users at the moment they need it? And is this information timely enough? In many cases, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done before real-time information, drawn from multiple sources, becomes a reality. A new survey of 338 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications reveals that real-time data access is still a distant pipe dream for at least half of the companies represented in the survey. The survey, conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with Attunity in March of 2012, finds that close to half of the survey respondents, 48%, report that relevant data within their organizations still take 24 hours or longer to reach decision makers. This suggests that much data is still batch-loaded overnight.
Posted October 09, 2012
Infrastructure software vendor TIBCO Software Inc., has announced the latest version of its data discovery and analytics platform, Spotfire 5.0. Featuring a redesigned in-memory engine, users across the enterprise will be able to visualize and interact with enormous amounts of data. Spotfire 5.0 is integrated with data warehouses such as Teradata, Oracle, and Microsoft, and accesses Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services cubes.
Posted October 02, 2012
Business analytics vendor OpTier has released OpTier APM 5.0, a solution that provides real-time business transaction analytics and deep diagnostics, enabling improved visibility and gains in productivity. OpTier also released a new Big Data Analytics solution that takes advantage of OpTier's business transaction-based platform, providing real-time big data analytics already in context and reducing time and cost.
Posted October 01, 2012
Quest Software has introduced Toad Business Intelligence Suite, a packaged suite of tools to link traditional and non-traditional data sources, bridging the gap between BI environments and distributed big data sources. In addition, Toad BI Suite aims to span the divide between technical and non-technical users by offering tailored interfaces designed to meet their individual data provisioning and analytic needs.
Posted September 26, 2012
SAP is offering new analytics software that bundles SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) solutions and the SAP Sybase IQ server, a high-performance data foundation designed specifically for analytics. The solutions help organizations of all sizes gain better insight into "big data" with advanced data visualization, self-service data discovery, mobile BI and predictive capabilities.
Posted September 26, 2012