At SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, SAP AG unveiled SAP HANA service pack 6 (SP6). In a key new capability, HANA now enables real-time insights across heterogeneous systems - including Hadoop. In addition, there are new geospatial capabilities, as well as a new open hardware architecture deployment model for tailored integration with customers' existing data centers. The added capabilities are part of a continued expansion of HANA as platform, and will be available by the end of this quarter, David Jonker, senior director of Big Data Marketing, SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

OpenText, a provider of enterprise information management (EIM) software, announced the expansion of the OpenText ECM Suite for SAP Solutions in support of SAP's latest technologies, including the SAP HANA platform, and cloud and mobility solutions. This support builds on a partnership that spans more than two decades and is growing every year, Patrick Barnert, senior vice president, Partners and Alliances, OpenText, tells 5 Minute Briefing. OpenText, he adds, is the first SAP ISV partner to have its products fully tested and confirmed by SAP to be integrated with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.

BI software vendor Yellowfin has signed an agreement with DIKW, a Dutch provider of business intelligence consulting, training and services. Through this reseller agreement, DIKW will make Yellowfin's solution, and associated training and implementation services, available to its clients and businesses throughout Benelux (Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg).

NuoDB, Inc., a provider of a cloud data management system offering SQL compliance and guaranteed ACID transactions, has introduced the NuoDB Starlings Release 1.1. Following on from its 1.0 release in January, NuoDB's Starlings Release 1.1 focuses on overall usability in three key areas, Seth Proctor, NuoDB chief architect, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The enhancements focus on greater Microsoft Windows support, general performance and stability, and an improved development and management experience in the web console, says Proctor.

What does it mean to be a "real-time enterprise"? It means having a well-connected organization, free of the shackles of siloed and slow-moving data environments. It means being able to compete in today's hyper-competitive economy by giving decision makers immediate access to the right information, at the right time.

MapR Technologies is integrating LucidWorks Search with the MapR Platform for Apache Hadoop to enable customers to perform predictive analytics, full search and discovery; and conduct advanced database operations on one platform. Integrated search and discovery on the MapR Big Data platform is currently in beta, and will be generally available next quarter in MapR's just-released M7 Edition, which combines Hadoop with NoSQL capabilities.

Strategic analytics provider Alteryx, Inc. has announced Alteryx Project Edition, a free analytics solution designed to enhance the capabilities of business and data analysts. Compatible with all data sources, the Project Edition utilizes the newly available Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.5 platform, enabling analyst to build, iterate and deploy an analytic workflow or application without the delay sand budget restrictions of legacy solutions. Users can create and run their analytic workflow and deliver their required output up to 15 times, or with incentives for additional output.

Datawatch Corporation, provider of information optimization solutions, has announced a strategic partnership with Lavastorm Analytics, an analytics software vendor, to provide customers the ability to expand their use of unstructured and semi-structured data sources when developing analytic applications.

Noetix Corp., a provider of business intelligence software and services for enterprise applications, has introduced Noetix Generator for QlikView, a solution to automate and simplify setting up QlikView for access to the data structures in Oracle E-Business Suite.

Dell Software today announced the latest version of Toad Business Intelligence Suite, an integrated solution to enable organizations to more easily access and extract meaningful information from traditional and non-traditional data sources. The latest release of Toad Business Intelligence Suite, which will be available this quarter, is planned to further facilitate self-service business intelligence across complex data environments.

Revolution Analytics, a provider of software, services and support for the open source R project, has released upgrades to its commercial-grade analytics software built upon the powerful open source R statistics language for R-based enterprise-class data analytics. Revolution R Enterprise 6.2, available now, features new advances in high-performance predictive analytics, including quick and easy stepwise regression for big data linear models and predictive analytics on data stored in Teradata databases.

MemSQL has made available a distributed version of its in-memory database and real-time analytics platform, enabling organizations to perform real-time analytics at big data scale. Also included in the release is MemSQL Watch, a browser-based interface that provides insight into software status, hardware performance, and system configuration in a single view.

As machines increasingly are fitted with internet and other network access, enterprises will be able to capture and increasingly expected to respond to more customer data than ever before. Machine-to-machine (M2M) network connections—this so-called "Internet of Things"—is positioned to become the next source of major competitive advantage. Whatever you call it, M2M is turning out to be the poster child for big data's "Three Vs": Volume, Velocity and Variety. What M2M data requires is a fourth "V" (Visualization) to convert its big data into value by giving users the ability to identify data patterns through real-time analytics.

Adding to its list of recent acquisitions (Pervasive, Versant), Actian Corp. a big data management vendor, announced the purchase of ParAccel, a leader in high-performance analytics. The acquisition adds Amazon, The Royal Bank of Scotland, OfficeMax and MicroStrategy to Actian's big data customer portfolio.

As machines increasingly are fitted with internet and other network access, enterprises will be able to capture and increasingly expected to respond to more customer data than ever before. Machine-to-machine (M2M) network connections—this so-called "Internet of Things"—is positioned to become the next source of major competitive advantage. Whatever you call it, M2M is turning out to be the poster child for big data's "Three Vs": Volume, Velocity and Variety. What M2M data requires is a fourth "V" (Visualization) to convert its big data into value by giving users the ability to identify data patterns through real-time analytics.

The conference agenda as well as the list of speakers is now available for DBTA's Big Data Boot Camp, a deep dive designed to bring together thought leaders and practitioners who will provide insight on how to collect, manage, and act on big data. The conference will be held May 21-22 at the Hilton New York. SAP is the diamond sponsor, and Objectivity and MarkLogic are platinum sponsors of the two-day event.

Dell Software today announced the latest version of Toad Business Intelligence Suite, an integrated solution to enable organizations to more easily access and extract meaningful information from traditional and non-traditional data sources. The latest release of Toad Business Intelligence Suite, which will be available this quarter, is planned to further facilitate self-service business intelligence across complex data environments.

Teradata, a provider of analytic data solutions, is offering business analysts self-service access to Apache Hadoop to enable quicker and smarter business decisions. According to the company, Teradata Enterprise Access for Hadoop, part of the Teradata Unified Data Architecture, allows business analysts to reach through Teradata directly into Hadoop to find new business value from the analysis of big data.

Adaptive Planning, provider of cloud-based business analytics solutions, has introduced Adaptive Consolidation, a cloud-based solution for comprehensive close-and-disclose financial consolidations and analysis. The solution provides a complete, integrated cloud-based suite of products spanning corporate performance management and business intelligence.

Prognoz, a provider of business analytics solutions, has unveiled Prognoz Platform version 7. This solution is intended to help managers, business analyst and other experts manage their big data and derive the information needed to predict future opportunities and improve decision-making.

The conference agenda as well as the list of speakers is now available for DBTA's Big Data Boot Camp, a deep dive designed to bring together thought leaders and practitioners who will provide insight on how to collect, manage, and act on big data. The conference will be held May 21-22 at the Hilton New York. SAP is the diamond sponsor, and Objectivity and MarkLogic are platinum sponsors of the two-day event.

Actian Corp. has completed the acquisition of Pervasive. The agreement for Actian to acquire Pervasive was announced earlier this year. Pervasive provides software to manage, integrate and analyze data, in the cloud or on premises, throughout the data lifecycle.

Lavastorm Analytics is building a partner ecosystem with its analytics platform at the center to help business analysts optimize their organizations' big data. Cyfeon Solutions and QlikView are two of the most recent integrations with Lavastorm.

In business, the rear view mirror is clearer than the windshield, said the sage of Omaha. And that is particularly true of business intelligence, composed almost entirely of such retrospectives. Consider this: Business intelligence proffers neatly organized historical data as a potential source of hindsight. Of course, there are also the dashboards of happenings in the "now" but precious little in terms of prompts to timely action. The time required to traverse that path from data to insight to intelligence to ideas to implementation to results is often the culprit. It's nowhere near quick enough, especially for businesses like banking, telecommunications and healthcare that set great store by the time value of information and the money value of time.

"Big data" and the impact of analytics on large quantities of data is a persistent meme in today's Information Technology market. One of the big questions looming in IT departments about big data is what, exactly, does it mean in terms of management and administration. Will traditional data management concepts such as data modeling, database administration, data quality, data governance, and data stewardship apply in the new age of big data? According to analysts at Wikibon, big data refers to datasets whose size, type and speed of creation make it impractical to process and analyze with traditional tools . So, given that definition, it would seem that traditional concepts are at the very least "impractical," right?

At COLLABORATE 13 in Denver, Oracle announced new releases of Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Endeca Information Discovery. Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite centralizes enterprise reporting, dashboards, and analytics on an integrated platform, and Endeca Information Discovery is an enterprise data discovery platform for intuitive analysis of information from structured and unstructured sources.

DBTA and Tableau Software will present a webcast on the Top Trends in Business Intelligence in 2013 on Thursday, April 11, at 11 am PT/ 2 pm ET. This webcast will enable attendees to better understand how visual analytics is helping organizations act on big data, how to realize the value of unstructured data, the new role of cloud in business intelligence, and how to leverage mobile BI.

JackBe, a provider of real-time intelligence, and Axeda, a cloud-based service and software vendor, have announced a partnership that unifies their complementary technologies to enhance the value of machine-to-machine (M2M) data. Through the JackBe-Axeda partnership, user-driven tooling from JackBe Presto combines with Axeda Machine Cloud's M2M event processing and data management.

New technologies designed to help companies and governments tackle big data have been unveiled by IBM. The new technologies include the new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise, and "BLU Acceleration," which is aimed at improving analytical performance in data management systems.