Business Intelligence

Anyone remotely within the orbit of SAP lately knows that its number-one focus is the HANA in-memory database and development platform. At this week's Sapphire conference in Orlando, the vendor sought to show the progress it is making in both building out HANA's capabilities as well as attracting developers and partners to HANA.

GE, Allstate try crowdsourcing contests where external brainiacs compete to produce the best answers to big-data analytics questions.

Infor is planning to offer customers a cloud-based data warehouse and analytics platform based on its own ION and Business Vault technology as well as Amazon's Redshift service.

The data is there, but according to IBM business analytics and optimisation leader, Graham Kittle, it is what we do with it that counts.

Forty-eight percent of the CIOs surveyed expect to increase spending this year, up slightly from this time last year. Mobile, business intelligence, and cloud infrastructure and services are the most cited categories.

Oracle has revised two of its business intelligence products, giving users the ability to wrest intelligence from a wider range of data sources, including spreadsheets, social media sites and Hadoop deployments.

Microsoft is hoping to shove aside rivals such as Salesforce.com and Oracle in the CRM (customer relationship management) software market by linking its own Dynamics CRM application with new capabilities for marketing automation and social media analysis.

Oracle has rolled out version X3-2 of its Database Appliance for small and medium-sized businesses that it says delivers up to twice the speed and more than four times as much storage as the first edition, which was launched in 2011.

BI (business intelligence) vendor MicroStrategy is getting out of the contact center software business, having sold off its Angel subsidiary to Genesys for roughly US$110 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in March.

The expanded partnership between Microsoft and Hadoop distribution specialist Hortonworks has borne fruit with the release of a beta of Hortonworks' Hadoop Data Platform for Windows.

Many organizations have yet to begin using systematic data analysis techniques in HR, marketing and social, according to Gartner.