Jaspersoft, a provider of business intelligence software, has introduced JasperReports Server Professional, a centrally-managed and secure reporting server for scheduling and distributing interactive reports. According to Jaspersoft the new solution will enable customers to create, deliver and embed interactive reports in a variety of formats for anyone in their organization, for as much as 80% less than prices charged by the traditional BI providers.

Predixion Software announced a relatively low-cost, self-service in the cloud predictive analytics solution that integrates with Microsoft's business intelligence platform. The new release, Predixion Insight, is intended to enable organizations to use and analyze large amounts of data to make actionable decisions, all within the familiar environment of Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot and SharePoint. "The predictive analytics market is disruptable because it is dominated by a couple of incumbent vendors that are very established, and they offer very comprehensive solutions, but with older technology that is difficult for the information worker to operate," Simon Arkell, CEO and co-founder of Predixion Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Oracle introduced the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8 at Oracle OpenWorld. The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads. "The data volumes now are huge, and they are going to keep getting bigger and as they grow rapidly, you will need more and more power," said Oracle president Mark Hurd, commenting on the release during a keynote at the Oracle conference.

5 Minute Briefing: Oracle had the opportunity to meet and speak with Pythian chief technology officer Alexander Gorbachev during Oracle OpenWorld about the company's achievement of four specializations under the OPN (Oracle PartnerNetwork) Specialized Program. Pythian, already a Platinum member of the OPN, has met a series of demanding technical and business requirements to earn the specializations in Oracle Database 11g, Real Application Clusters (RAC), Database Performance Tuning, and Oracle Linux.

Estimates put the amount of data in existence at this time at more than a zettabyte (or a trillion gigabytes), which would be the equivalent of 75 billion fully loaded iPads. All this data is streaming into and through enterprises from transactions, remote devices, partner sites and user-generated content, with formats varying from structured, relational data to graphics and videos.

Aster Data has introduced Aster Data nCluster 4.6, which includes a column data store. This release, the company says, makes Aster Data nCluster 4.6 the first platform with a unified SQL-MapReduce analytic framework on a hybrid row and column massively parallel processing (MPP) database management system (DBMS). The unified SQL-MapReduce analytic framework and Aster Data's suite of more than 1,000 MapReduce-ready analytic functions, delivers richer, high performance analytics on large data volumes where data can be stored in either a row or column format.

Oracle last week introduced the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8. The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads. With this announcement, there are now four configurations of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack and the Oracle Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack, half-rack and full-rack systems.

Estimates put the amount of data in existence at this time at more than a zettabyte (or a trillion gigabytes), which would be the equivalent of 75 billion fully loaded iPads. All this data is streaming into and through enterprises from transactions, remote devices, partner sites and user-generated content, with formats varying from structured, relational data to graphics and videos.

Just 6 months after launching Ignite 8, Confio Software's newest release of its performance analysis tool, the company has announced that nearly 90% of Confio's Oracle customer base has upgraded to Ignite 8 representing over 10,000 monitored Oracle instances worldwide. "DBAs are busy people and they won't upgrade unless there is really something of value there, so the fact that they have really jumped on the new release is because they saw it and they said, this is something we absolutely want to do," Don Bergal, chief operating officer at Confio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has revealed the results of a new report, "Measuring the Business Impacts of Effective Data." The study benchmarks leading enterprises across a wide range of industries by measuring the direct correlation between a company's IT investments and overall business performance.

Revelation Software has announced that OpenInsight 9.2.1 is now in development and will include a new Version Control module, as well as O4W (OpenInsight for Web) release 1.1. O4W 1.0 was released earlier this year as part of the latest release of OpenInsight. "When we released O4W 1.0, which was within our OpenInsight 9.2 release, we received so much feedback - not only to the initial release but even during the beta testing phase," says Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, that Revelation had to stop the development of O4W at a certain point in order to get the documentation in sync. This resulted in a backlog of features that needed to be included, "and they are showing up now in the 9.2.1 release," he tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Rocket Software is offering two webinars in October. The first is an overview of the upcoming U2 University event, to be held in Denver, November 9-11. Registration is now open for Oct 6, 2010 9 am MDT and Oct 6, 2010 4 pm MDT.

Entrinsik Inc., a leading provider of innovative web-based operational reporting and analysis solutions, has formed a partnership with NetVU to offer Entrinsik's Informer Web Reporting software to insurance agencies across the country. For years, Entrinsik has participated in insurance agency management system conferences and has been recognized as a valued supplier/vendor to Vertafore agencies.

Trillium Software, a business of Harte-Hanks, Inc., has introduced the latest version of the Trillium Software System. Designed to visualize data issues, improve business rule validation and enhance data quality monitoring in operational environments, the new Trillium Software System is aimed at helping business users and analysts, data stewards and IT professionals work together to improve business decisions and outcomes through better, more accurate information.

InterSystems Corporation will next week roll out a new version of its Caché high-performance object database. The new release targets the growing demand by CIOs for economical high availability by introducing database mirroring, while also addressing Java developers' need for high-volume high-performance processing combined with persistent storage for event processing systems. Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president for software development, recently chatted with 5 Minute Briefing about the release and the new features it offers. Commenting on the growing interest in NoSQL databases, Nagle observes that many of the beneficial characteristics people see in NoSQL are in fact true of Caché - a flexible data model and zero DBA cost. "But for us, what is unique is that it is not NoSQL, it is that it needs to be SQL - without the overhead of relational technology - because I think SQL is extremely important for almost every class of application that is deployed."

IBM today announced its intention to acquire Netezza, a publicly held company based in Marlborough, Mass., in a cash transaction at a price of $27 per share or at a net price of approximately $1.7 billion, after adjusting for cash. Business analytics is one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry, observed Arvind Krishna, general manager of IBM's Software Group's Information Management business, during an IBM press teleconference to discuss the significance of the planned acquisition. By bringing the simplicity, ease of deployment, and speed of Netezza to IBM, the acquisition will help IBM accelerate its initiatives "to bring analytics to the masses," added Jim Baum, president and CEO of Netezza. The transaction, which is subject to Netezza shareholder approval, regulatory clearances and other customary closing conditions, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Symantec Corp. announced the availability of Symantec Enterprise Vault 9.0 and Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector, technology to help organizations store, manage and discover information across the enterprise. The vendor also announced NetBackup 5000 deduplication appliance and cloud storage for NetBackup and Backup Exec to help organizations reduce their data storage footprints and more effectively leverage cloud-based data storage services.

Oracle has introduced Oracle GoldenGate 11g and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g, new releases of the two products that form the foundation of Oracle's data integration product line. The new products, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, offer tighter integration with Oracle applications and technologies, support for additional heterogeneous systems, and improved performance.

Oracle has introduced Oracle GoldenGate 11g and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g, new releases of the two products that form the foundation of Oracle's data integration product line. Oracle GoldenGate 11g delivers real-time data integration and continuous availability for mission-critical systems through its low-impact, low-latency data acquisition, distribution and delivery capabilities, and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition 11g provides loading and transformation of data into a data warehouse environment through its high-performance extract, load and transform (E-LT) technology.

Informatica today kicks off the Informatica Customer Centricity tour in North America. The multi-city road show starting today in Boston will focus on educating business and IT leaders across enterprises to empower sales, marketing and channel teams to maximize account revenue and optimize channel operations through the use of master data management as well as complementary capabilities of the Informatica Platform including data Integration, data quality and B2B data exchange.

Oracle is a fast-changing company, and in recent years, its pace has accelerated to blinding speed. The software giant has expanded well beyond its relational database roots to encompass applications, management tools, service-oriented architecture and middleware, and even hardware. There are now many components to Oracle - from three major databases, to enterprise resource applications, to web applications to development languages to open source desktop tools.

Many organizations now have, in their possession, the sophisticated analysis tools and dashboards that connect to back-end systems and enable them to peer deeply into their businesses to assess progress on all fronts-from revenues to stock outs to employee performance. However, a recent survey of 279 Oracle applications managers reveals that when it comes to decision making, simple spreadsheets still remain the tool of choice. And business users still wait days, weeks, and months for their IT departments to deliver reports, despite significant investments in performance management systems.

Many organizations now have, in their possession, the sophisticated analysis tools and dashboards that connect to back-end systems and enable them to peer deeply into their businesses to assess progress on all fronts-from revenues to stock outs to employee performance. However, a recent survey of 279 Oracle applications managers reveals that when it comes to decision making, simple spreadsheets still remain the tool of choice.

LogiXML, a business intelligence tool provider, announced a new release of the company's Web-based ad hoc reporting solution, Logi Ad Hoc Version 10. Logi Ad Hoc is a self-service business intelligence application that enables business users to create sophisticated dashboards and reports without IT involvement.

Oracle recently hosted a 6-hour online forum to showcase its strategy for virtualization. Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, kicked off the agenda of analyst, customer and product webcasts, by explaining how Oracle delivers a complete virtualization offering, all the way from desktop through the data center and why that approach provides more customer benefits than point solutions.

The Rocket U2 Denver team is moving its offices. According to the company, customers should see minimal-to-no disruption in service during the relocation, as the U2BC system and U2 websites are hosted at another Rocket site. Starting Monday, August 30, the new address will be 4600 S. Ulster Street, Suite 1100, Denver, Colo., 80237. All phone numbers and email addresses remain the same.

Entrinsik has announced that, at the recommendation of its solution provider, Progenixx, the Everett Housing Authority (EHA) has selected Entrinsik's Informer Web Reporting software. For over 60 years, EHA has served the housing needs of the people of Everett, Wash. Critical to supporting this commitment is the ability to provide its staff across four departments with information that is up-to-the-minute and easily accessible in order to optimize decision making without burdening IT with numerous custom report requests.

At an event last week co-located in Boston and Frankfurt, company leaders from SAP AG and Sybase came together for the first time to share the strategy and joint product direction for the newly combined companies. SAP confirmed that Sybase will be run as a separate, independent unit - and that customer investments in Sybase products will be preserved and supported.

Sybase has introduced a new version of Sybase Replication Server, Sybase's database replication product, which supports change data capture, data distribution and synchronization of data across heterogeneous database environments for real-time analytics, reporting, distributed operations and disaster recovery.