Showing that there's more to the real-time SAP HANA platform than just business, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and SAP announced they have worked together to launch NBA.com/Stats, a new statistical destination on NBA.com giving fans interactive access to official NBA statistics and analysis.

SAP is offering a new solution to help customers quickly adopt SAP cloud solutions by using a phased and non-disruptive approach. The SAP ERP HCM Integration to SuccessFactors rapid-deployment solution is intended to enable customers to keep their implementation on track, on time and on budget. The approach is comprised of integration tools based on standard APIs and pre-packaged integration content — both on premise and cloud-based — with the end goal of lowering cost, and increasing speed and simplicity for customers running hybrid deployment scenarios.

SAP AG has introduced a new version of its Sybase IQ disk-based column store analytics server. The overriding theme of this new release, which will be generally available later in the first quarter, "is positioning IQ 16 to go from terabytes to petabytes," Dan Lahl, senior director of product marketing at SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. To accomplish this, IQ 16 provides enhancements in three critical areas.

Rocket Software has announced the general availability of the Rocket U2 Toolkit for .NET v1.2 (U2NETDK), which delivers Microsoft .NET interfaces for the UniVerse and UniData data servers. The new release allows .NET programmers to leverage the Microsoft .NET Framework and CLR (Common Language Runtime) with the U2 databases.

Revelation Software is inviting members of its Works Subscription program to take part in the beta test of OpenInsight 9.4. The new release includes Improvements to the MVBFS (MultiValue Based Filing System) connector, as well as additional minor updates that have been requested by users, Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, tells DBTA.

Michigan State University (Michigan State), University of Michigan (Michigan) and University of Texas-Austin (Texas) plan to implement the Paciolan Ticketing Intelligence data warehouse in order to more efficiently aggregate and utilize data about interaction between university athletics and sports fans.

Establishing a data warehousing or business intelligence environment initiates a process that works its way through the operational applications and data sources across an enterprise. This process focuses not only on identifying the important data elements the business lives and breathes, but the process also tries very hard to provide rationality in explaining these elements to business intelligence users.

MarkLogic said it plans to deliver an enterprise-grade application and analytics software solution based on the new Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software. The Intel Distribution will be combined with the MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL database to support real-time transactional and analytic applications.

LucidWorks, a provider of enterprise-grade search development platforms, has partnered with MapR Technologies, a Hadoop technology vendor, to deliver the integration between LucidWorks Search and MapR. This solution enables organizations to search their MapR Distributed File System (DFS) to discover actionable insights from information stored in Hadoop.

Data integration software vendor Informatica announced a partnership with Amazon Redshift to deliver a new cloud data integration solution for direct connectivity to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud-based data warehouse service. Informatica seeks to make cloud-based analytics a viable and affordable option for small and large organizations alike.

Hortonworks has announced that the Hortonworks Data Platform is now available for Windows in addition to Linux, enabling organizations to run Hadoop-based solutions natively on Windows. According to Hortonworks, making the Hortonworks Data Platform available for Windows is a necessary step in its strategy to broaden the reach of Apache Hadoop across the enterprise.

SAP AG has introduced a new version of its Sybase IQ disk-based column store analytics server. The overriding theme of this new release, which will be generally available later in the first quarter, "is positioning IQ 16 to go from terabytes to petabytes," Dan Lahl, senior director of product marketing at SAP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. To accomplish this, IQ 16 provides enhancements in three critical areas.

Attunity is developing a solution for fast data loading into Amazon Redshift, AWS's new data warehouse in the cloud. The Attunity solution is expected to be available for customer preview in March 2013.

Hortonworks, a contributor to Apache Hadoop, has submitted two new incubation projects to the Apache Software Foundation and also announced the launch of the new "Stinger Initiative." These three projects seek to address key enterprise requirements regarding Hadoop application security and performance.

Establishing a data warehousing or business intelligence environment initiates a process that works its way through the operational applications and data sources across an enterprise. This process focuses not only on identifying the important data elements the business lives and breathes, but the process also tries very hard to provide rationality in explaining these elements to business intelligence users.

Denodo Technologies, a provider of data virtualization software, has unveiled the Denodo Platform 5.0. This latest version of Denodo´s solution enables data virtualization for both agile business intelligence and agile development of connected application and helps organizations access all of their information sources including big data, cloud and unstructured sources. The new release was previewed at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas.

Attivio has made available Version 3.5 of its Active Intelligence Engine, featuring a new ontology module and event-driven visualization capabilities that give analysts an instant understanding of what's happening on large, multi-node systems. AIE 3.5 also includes expanded SQL support and automatic generation of thumbnail and preview images to enhance users' ability to view and retrieve critical information.

Terracotta, a provider of enterprise big data management solutions, and JackBe, a real-time intelligence software vendor, have announced a collaboration to leverage their complementary technologies for real-time big data solutions. According to the vendors, JackBe's Presto real-time data visualizations for analytics coupled with Terracotta's BigMemory high-performance and scalability enables JackBe to deliver visual data exploration and dashboards with the speed, scale and simplicity of in-memory data management.

Oracle has introduced Hyperion Tax Provision, a new web-based tax application that allows customers to collect, calculate and report on the consolidated tax provision and more closely align tax with financial reporting. Built on the Hyperion Financial Close Suite, Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision is intended to replace the manual methods used by many organizations with an automated and standardized process.

Expanding its cloud portfolio, Oracle has unveiled Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (Oracle IaaS) with "Capacity on Demand." "For the first time, you can get Oracle engineered systems deployed on premise behind your firewall for a monthly fee," said Oracle president Mark Hurd, during a live webcast that presented details of the offering. Announced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld in 2012, Oracle IaaS enables organizations to deploy fully integrated engineered systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance in their data centers.

Oracle has introduced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Oracle VM Templates for several Oracle applications. The Oracle applications have been packaged as ready-to-run virtual machines for deployment in Oracle's Exalogic Elastic Cloud environment, explains Adam Hawley, senior director of desktop and server virtualization product management at Oracle. The templates are now available for the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1, Oracle's PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.52 and Oracle's Siebel CRM 8.1.1.8 and 8.2.2. These are the first Oracle VM templates built for Oracle Exalogic.

In-memory technology—in which entire data sets are pre-loaded into a computer's random access memory, alleviating the need for shuttling data between memory and disk storage every time a query is initiated—has actually been around for a number of years. However, with the onset of big data, as well as an insatiable thirst for analytics, the industry is taking a second look at this promising approach to speeding up data processing.

Establishing a data warehousing or business intelligence environment initiates a process that works its way through the operational applications and data sources across an enterprise. This process focuses not only on identifying the important data elements the business lives and breathes, but the process also tries very hard to provide rationality in explaining these elements to business intelligence users.

Entrinsik has launched a traveling road show to provide Informer training. The idea for the Informer Power Users Road Show grew out of the success of the ICON Informer user conference and the feedback Entrinsik was receiving about the Informer customer service team's on-site work with individual clients, Sharon Shelton, vice president of marketing at Entrinsik, tells DBTA. "The road shows are really an answer to the question: How do we provide this service for more of our client base - especially those who can't make it to ICON, or don't have the resources to afford implementation and training services on-site. We are trying to get the best information out to customers in a way that is cost-efficient for them and for us," Shelton says.

Enterprise NoSQL database provider MarkLogic is making available a free developer license for MarkLogic Enterprise Edition. The developer license provides access to MarkLogic Enterprise Edition features such as integrated search, government-grade security, clustering, replication, failover, alerting, geospatial indexing, conversion, as well as a set of application development tools. MarkLogic is also introducing a Java-based tool for importing data from MongoDB into MarkLogic.

Oracle president Mark Hurd and Oracle executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian recently hosted a conference call to provide an update on Oracle's cloud strategy and recap of product-related developments. Oracle is trying to do two things for customers - simplify their IT and power their innovation, said Hurd.

Oracle has introduced support for Android with Oracle Virtual Desktop Client 1.2 for tablets. The new Android support adds to the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client software portfolio for iPad, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, which enables access to Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Sun Ray Software deployments, and helps organizations to deliver on corporate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives. "Enterprise adoption of mobile devices is expanding rapidly and users want access to their desktop applications from anywhere," said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle.

Dell Inc. announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which it will be acquired by Michael Dell, Dell's founder, chairman and CEO, in partnership with global technology investment firm Silver Lake. The transaction will be financed through a combination of cash and equity contributed by Michael Dell, cash funded by investment funds affiliated with Silver Lake, cash invested by MSD Capital, L.P., a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, as well as financing from other sources. The transaction is expected to close before the end of the second quarter of Dell's FY2014.

Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop, has released Hortonworks Sandbox, a learning environment and on-ramp for anyone interested in learning, evaluating or using Apache Hadoop in the enterprise. This tool seeks to bridge the gap between people who want to learn Hadoop, and the complexity of setting up a cluster with an integrated environment that provides demos, videos, tutorials.