Business Intelligence and Analytics Articles
The explosion of big data has presented many challenges for today's database administrators (DBAs), who are responsible for managing far more data than ever before. And with more programs being developed and tested, more tools are needed to help optimize data and efficiency efforts. Using techniques such as DB2's Multi-Row Fetch (MRF), DBAs are able to cut down on CPU time - and improve application efficiency. MRF was introduced in DB2 version 8 in 2004. Stated simply, it is the ability for DB2 to send multiple rows back to a requesting program at once, rather than one row at a time.
Posted January 29, 2013
Databases are hampered by a reliance on disk-based storage, a technology that has been in place for more than two decades. Even with the addition of memory caches and solid state drives, the model of relying on repeated access to the permanent information storage devices is still a bottleneck in capitalizing on today's "big data," according to a new survey of 323 data managers and professionals who are part of the IOUG. Nearly 75% of respondents believe that in-memory technology is important to enabling their organization to remain competitive in the future. Yet, almost as many also indicate they lack the in-memory skills to deliver even current business requirements. The research results are detailed in a new report, titled "Accelerating Enterprise Insights: 2013 IOUG In-Memory Strategies Survey."
Posted January 24, 2013
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.
Posted January 23, 2013
The recent explosion of digital data has affected businesses of all sizes and has opened opportunities for companies that adopt machine learning technology - including predictive analytics - to mine intelligence from data assets. Predictive analytics has the potential to transform traditional small to medium businesses (SMBs), which have the same desire to take better advantage of their data assets as larger organizations - but the process with which they can glean strategic value from that data is significantly different.
Posted January 23, 2013
For the 20th year in a row, IBM topped an annual list of U.S. patent recipients. The company received 6,478 patents in 2012 for inventions that will enable advancements in areas including analytics, big data, cyber security, cloud, mobile, social networking and software defined environments, as well as industry solutions for retail, banking, healthcare, and transportation. IBM's motivation extends beyond simply achieving high numbers of patent filings, Graham Mackintosh, program executive for social analytics at IBM, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We care about the innovation. The patent activity is a byproduct."
Posted January 22, 2013
OpenText, a provider of reporting software, says it is shipping a new interface that extends its enterprise information management reporting capabilities to mainframe-generated content by making it available to users of OpenText Content Server, OpenText eDOCS, and Microsoft SharePoint. "The Report & Output Management interface now allows mainframe output and content to be included as a source within the enterprise," Jason Likins, vice president of report and output at OpenText, tells 5 Minute Briefing. This includes business-centric information captured from mainframes, he says.
Posted January 22, 2013
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has announced the associate member organizations participating in the 2013 OAUG Star Partner Program, which connects providers of related products and solutions with Oracle Applications users throughout the year.
Posted January 15, 2013
JackBe Presto has been accredited with the Certificate of Networthiness (CoN) by the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM). To receive this award, JackBe had to meet the U.S. Army's requirements for security, compatibility, supportability, governance and sustainability. All organizations managing information systems on the Army Enterprise Architecture are required to have the CoN, which manages the risks and impacts associated with the fielding of information systems, as well as sustains the health of the Army Enterprise Infrastructure.
Posted January 15, 2013
Enterprise software vendor Attivio, creators of Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), has received $8 million in new growth funding from General Electric Pension Trust, supplementing a $34 million investment led by Oak Investment Partners in October, totaling $71 million investment funds to date. "Our focus going forward is around verticals, and we are going to empower and strengthen each of the verticals that we have ventured out on, including financial services, digital media, government intelligence, and life sciences," Ali Riaz, CEO of Attivio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted January 15, 2013
Real-time big data vendor SQLstream Inc. has released the newest generation of its streaming big data management platform, SQLstream s-Server 3.0. With improved speed and scalability, the flagship product introduces high performance distributed stream processing, Google BigQuery integration, and enhanced platform manageability and streaming application development.
Posted January 15, 2013
SAP announced a new option for SAP Business Suite customers — SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA — providing an integrated family of business applications that captures and analyzes transactional data in real time on a single in-memory platform. With Business Suite on HANA, "SAP has reinvented the software that reinvented businesses," stated Rob Enslin, member of the Global Executive Board and SAP head of sales, as part of his presentation during the company's recent launch event.
Posted January 10, 2013
Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Transportation Management 6.3 and Oracle Global Trade Management 6.3, which provide new capabilities including enhanced fleet management, transportation sourcing, transportation business intelligence, transportation planning, rail transportation, workflow and event management, freight payment, billing and claims, document management and customs management.
Posted January 09, 2013
Oracle has enhanced Oracle Retail Category Management, which helps grocers, big box retailers, hardlines and department stores improve sales through a planning process that helps to create assortments, pricing and promotions tailored to specific customer segments. Built on the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server, this is the latest solution update within the suite of Planning, Optimization, Forecasting and Supply Chain solutions that are based on the flexible and scalable platform.
Posted January 09, 2013
Oracle has agreed to acquire Eloqua, Inc, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management software for $23.50 per share or approximately $871 million, net of Eloqua's cash. "Eloqua's leading marketing automation cloud will become the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud and is an important addition to the Oracle Customer Experience offering, which includes the Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Commerce Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Content Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud," said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Development. The board of directors of Eloqua has unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close in the first half of 2013, subject to Eloqua stockholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
Posted January 09, 2013
Software AG has agreed to sell its SAP-service operations in Canada and the USA to itelligence, a full-service provider of IT solutions for the SAP market with approximately 2,700 employees in 21 countries. Its headquarters are in Bielefeld, Germany. The transaction closing is scheduled for January 16 and according to the companies the purchase price will not be disclosed. The transaction includes all of Software AG's SAP product-specific services in Canada and the U.S., which are coordinated from Toronto and Reston, Virginia respectively. In addition, itelligence plans to acquire the majority of around 80 employees as of January 16.
Posted January 09, 2013
To help satisfy its customers' need for reports providing information and insights, F.W. Davison & Company has embedded Entrinsik Informer's agile BI capabilities into its platform and also developed more than 1,200 core report templates, writes Sharon Shelton, Entrinsik's vice president of marketing, in a recent blog post. F.W. Davison is a provider of high-performance software solutions for professional employer organizations, and sells its software to human resources outsourcing vendors, some of which have hundreds of thousands of small business clients.
Posted January 03, 2013
Splunk, a provider of real-time operational intelligence software is offering new software development kits (SDKs) for Java and Python to make it easier for application developers to customize Splunk Enterprise, enabling real-time big data insights across the organization. Splunk previously released the GA version of the Splunk SDK for JavaScript for Splunk Enterprise 5, and a Splunk SDK for PHP is in public preview. "It is the idea of enabling the entire organization with the insights, the machine data, the big data insights that IT traditionally has gotten out of Splunk - and bringing those same insights to marketing, to sales, to customer service, and other divisions and other organizations to break the stovepipe of traditional enterprise. We feel that developers and the developer platform is the key to doing that," Jon Rooney, director of developer marketing at Splunk, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 21, 2012
Progress Software, a provider of software for connecting business applications to data and services, has released DataDirect Connect and DataDirect Connect XE for ODBC 7.1. The releases provide fast, reliable, secure and scalable connectivity for Apache Hive, as well as expanded support for cloud databases including Microsoft SQL Azure. DataDirect Connect and DataDirect Connect XE for ODBC 7.1 also offer new features for IBM DB2 10.1, IBM DB2 pureScale 9.8, Teradata 14, and Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Posted December 19, 2012
Opportunities abound for organizations that are able to gain insight into customers, sales, markets, and processes, by analyzing data culled from a myriad of sources across the enterprise. This rich information can enable executives, managers, and professionals to answer questions never possible before. As a result, for the companies that are able to provide business decision makers with quick and efficient access to BI or analytic data from which they can create their own interfaces and reports, competitive advantage can be realized.
Posted December 19, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of information availability software solutions, has officially launched Attunity CloudBeam, a fully-managed data transfer SaaS platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3). With its beta completed, the high-performance data transfer solution was unveiled and demonstrated live at the AWS re: Invent Customer and Partner Conference from in Las Vegas, NV. "This is aimed at folks today that are using AWS or will be using AWS for all kinds of use cases where data is core to their strategy," Matt Benati, vice president of Global Marketing at Attunity, tells DBTA. "All these use cases demand the movement of data and it really has to be a frictionless movement of data at scale. That is what Attunity does best."
Posted December 19, 2012
New releases of the Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Big Data Connectors are now available. Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 is an engineered system of hardware and software that has been upgraded to include Intel's new processors and the latest release (4.1) of Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager, as well as the new Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-in for Big Data Appliance.
Posted December 19, 2012
SAP announced the general availability of SAP Predictive Analysis software, which is intended to help organizations gain a competitive edge by uncovering and predicting trends in their business. SAP Predictive Analysis can be deployed stand-alone or with other SAP software, including the SAP HANA platform.
Posted December 19, 2012
The University of Minnesota, a top research institution comprised of five campuses, 65,000 students and 25,000 employees, has made systematic changes and improved database administration efficiency with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. By hosting its IT environment on two Oracle Exadata Database Machine half racks, the university consolidated more than 200 Oracle database instances into fewer than 20, enabling it to reduce data center floor space and total cost of ownership.
Posted December 12, 2012
At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual conference for customers and partners, John Matelski, president of the IOUG, and CIO for Dekalb County, Georgia, gave his perspective on the key takeaways from this year's event. Matelski also described the user group's efforts to help the community understand the value of Oracle's engineered systems and deal with the broad implications of big data, and how the IOUG is supporting Oracle DBAs in their evolving roles.
Posted December 12, 2012
Yellowfin, a business intelligence vendor, has released Storyboard, a new presentation and collaboration platform for BI that offers a fully integrated and interactive presentation module for BI content. Storyboard's user interface allows BI insights to be intuitively incorporated into businesses' decision-making process and empowers business users to collaborate and benefit from BI.
Posted December 11, 2012
HP announced a range of new enhancements to its Converged Storage portfolio, intended to address storage management issues within virtualized, cloud and big data archive environments. The refresh of the company's storage portfolio includes new HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreAll Storage, and HP StoreOnce Backup product offerings. With the understanding that the storage sprawl at many organizations is unsustainable, the goal of the updated HP storage portfolio is to simplify the overall experience within customer environments, Craig Nunes, vice president of worldwide marketing, HP Storage, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 10, 2012
While no one can dispute the importance of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to organizational performance and competitiveness, executives in charge of these systems are under intense pressure to stay within or trim budgets. Close to half of the executives in a new survey say they have held off on new upgrades for at least a few years. In the meantime, at least one out of four enterprises either are scaling back or have had to scale back their recent ERP projects due to budget constraints.
Posted December 06, 2012
Kore Technologies has announced KommerceServer Mobile Edition, providing the capabilities of KommerceServer webStoreFront and webPortal in a compact mobile package. The new mobile edition is intended to be a complement to Kore customers' corporate websites. The mobile edition enables end users to browse a company web catalog, make online purchases, and access their account histories using a streamlined interface designed for the requirements and workflow of the mobile user.
Posted December 06, 2012
Actian Corporation and Versant Corporation, both real-time information management software providers, have announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement through which Actian will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Versant for $13 per share in cash for a purchase price of approximately $37 million. Versant's board of directors unanimously approved the Actian acquisition agreement.
Posted December 04, 2012
At SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd co-located in Madrid earlier this month, SAP announced new solutions leveraging the SAP HANA platform. The new solutions aim to enable real-time planning, reporting and analysis on large-scale volumes of data, new sense-and-respond scenarios and personalized interactions with consumers.
Posted November 28, 2012
In-memory technology provider Terracotta, Inc. has announced that javax.cache, a caching standard for Java applications, has entered Draft Review Stage under the Java Community Process. It provides a standard approach for how Java applications temporarily cache data, an essential technology for in-memory solutions and a critical factor in achieving high performance and scalability of big data.
Posted November 27, 2012
Business analytics provider Birst Inc. has released the second version of Birst Mobile for the iPad, a native iOS application that offers easy access to reports and charts and enhanced business intelligence dashboards. Taking full advantage of Apple's gesture-based user interface, Birst Mobile provides information management, reporting, ad hoc analysis and dashboard displays via the iPad.
Posted November 27, 2012
Jeff West, president of Quest International Users Group, joined by Jonathan Vaughn, Quest's executive director, talked with DBTA at Oracle OpenWorld about what's ahead for 2013. The group has launched smaller, product-concentrated events to support JD Edwards and PeopleSoft users' specific areas of interest, and expanded its range of online offerings for users who may not be able take advantage of in-person conferences. Plans are underway to help members learn about PeopleSoft 9.2 coming in March and to prepare for the looming end of support for JD Edwards World. As always, says West, Quest continues to help get information to members from Oracle and their peers. "It is always about return on investment and aligning IT with the business. That is always on the top of people's minds."
Posted November 27, 2012
Pentaho Corporation, a business analytics provider, has announced new capabilities in its data integration and business analytics platform, including Instaview, an instant big data discovery application, and Pentaho Mobile for iPad. According to the company, the new capabilities will enable IT developers, data analysts and business users to move from data to decisions more quickly, and are included in the 4.8 release of Pentaho Business Analytics Enterprise Edition.
Posted November 20, 2012
At Enterprise World, OpenText's annual customer conference, the company unveiled OpenText Cloud, which aims to provide all OpenText software as cloud-based offerings, in addition to the existing on-premises products. OpenText provides enterprise information management software that enables companies to manage, secure and leverage their unstructured business information. OpenText Cloud provides customers with anytime, anywhere access to OpenText's EIM solution portfolio in the cloud, including more than 20 ready-to-use applications and services.
Posted November 16, 2012
Real-time operational intelligence provider Splunk has announced the general availability of Splunk Enterprise 5, the latest version of the company's flagship product. The new release includes added features to create a platform for developers building big data applications. "Even as data volume and complexity are growing exponentially, the time people are willing to wait for answers is shrinking," observes Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, Splunk.
Posted November 15, 2012
MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the MapR Distribution for Hadoop, has formed a partnership with Hadapt, which offers a data analytics platform for natively integrating SQL with Apache Hadoop. The partnership enables customers to leverage MapR's Hadoop distribution in conjunction with Hadapt's Interactive Query capabilities to analyze all types of data, structured, semi-structured and unstructured, in a single, enterprise platform. Partnerships such as the one with Hadapt enable a broad community of users to have access to Hadoop data while also leveraging the existing skill sets of those users, Jack Norris, vice president of MapR, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 15, 2012
For years, data warehouses and extract, transform and load (ETL) have been the primary methods of accessing and archiving multiple data sources across enterprises. Now, an emerging approach - data virtualization - promises to advance the concept of the federated data warehouse to deliver more timely and easier-to-access enterprise data. These are some of the observations made at Composite Software's third Annual Data Virtualization Day, held in New York City. This year's gathering was the largest ever, with nearly 250 customers and practitioners in attendance, Composite reports.
Posted November 13, 2012
Entrinsik, Inc., has announced that its Informer self-service reporting and business intelligence software is now listed on SugarCRM'sSugarExchange and can integrate directly with SugarCRM implementations. Through the integration between Entrinsik and SugarCRM, users can log into Sugar and access real-time reporting, data analysis and interactive dashboards. "It allows users to integrate multiple sources of data without even leaving the Sugar instance and without having to set up a separate data store or data cube which they would typically have to do in order to access data from multiple data sources," Sharon Shelton, vice president of marketing at Entrinsik, tells DBTA.
Posted November 13, 2012
Predictive analytics vendor Alpine Data Labs has released Alpine 2.8, the latest version of the company's flagship product that leverages Hadoop and enables enterprises to derive business value from their big data. Alpine 2.8 users can executive analytics on combined data from Hadoop and relational databases from their web browser without any additional investments in hardware or infrastructure.
Posted November 13, 2012