data mining

Microsoft is attempting to break down the barriers to business intelligence with Power BI for Office 365, which is designed to let companies gain new insights by tapping both structured and unstructured and internal and external data.

As enterprises seek to move into the big data world -- digitizing paper documents and saving email communications, Word docs, Excel files and all sorts of other unstructured data with the hopes of mining them for actionable business intelligence -- they need to address a big problem up front: storage.

Jive Software is buying data-mining startup Proximal Labs in a move that will help it derive deeper insights into social-networking data, the companies announced Wednesday. Terms were not disclosed.

You have to run a business, and that requires understanding what interests your customers. But you also want to do the right thing and protect your customers' privacy.