Data Integration Articles
The term "big data" refers to the massive amounts of data being generated on a daily basis by businesses and consumers alike - data which cannot be processed using conventional data analysis tools owing to its sheer size and, in many case, its unstructured nature. Convinced that such data hold the key to improved productivity and profitability, enterprise planners are searching for tools capable of processing big data, and information technology providers are scrambling to develop solutions to accommodate new big data market opportunities.
Posted May 09, 2012
Websites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have brought social networking and the concept of online community to a huge cross-section of our society. Penetration and usage of these platforms may vary depending on demographic (age and geography, in particular), but no one can debate the impact of Facebook and Twitter on both everyday life and on society in general.
Posted May 09, 2012
PK, a software firm based in The Netherlands, has been recognized with the InterSystems Award for Breakthrough Applications. PK, an InterSystems application partner, was recognized for its CU-BOX mobile application for real-time emergency services response measurement. CU-BOX uses the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance database system and InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform to provide critical, objective information about the quality of emergency healthcare delivery.
Posted May 09, 2012
Information access provider Attivio has partnered with QlikTech to provide self-service BI and access to structured and unstructured information sources throughout the enterprise. With the merging of Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) and QlikTech's QlikView Business Discovery platforms, the companies aim to allow for enhanced business insights and better decision making by enabling users to access, manage and interact with any type of information, regardless of source or format.
Posted May 08, 2012
TIBCO Software Inc., a provider of infrastructure software on-premise and in the cloud, has announced the latest version of its analytics platform: Spotfire 4.5. This new release will feature visualization-based data discovery and collaboration capabilities for all types of extreme information, including big data. Additionally, Spotfire 4.5 will provide greater data exploration and new predictive analytics capabilities of both structured data and unstructured content, as well as iPad compatibility that allows users to construct "private-branded" Spotfire Analytics solutions. Together, these capabilities are intended to offer organizations the ability to leverage all of their data to better discover and predict business outcomes that can be delivered to a larger population.
Posted May 08, 2012
IBM has announced plans to acquire Tealeaf Technology, Inc., a provider of customer experience analytics software that helps organizations react more quickly to consumer trends. With this agreement, IBM says it will support its Smarter Commerce initiative with the acquisition of qualitative analytics capabilities that provide CMOs, e-commerce, and customer service professionals with real-time and automated insights into customer buying experiences across online and mobile devices.
Posted May 04, 2012
The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), will co-host the OAUG Connection Point - Release 12.1/Fusion Applications conference, in partnership with the South Texas Oracle Applications Users Group (STOAUG) and the OAUG Upgrade SIG, July 11-12 at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown in Austin, Tex. The call for presentations for the event is open through May 10.
Posted May 03, 2012
Google has announced that Google BigQuery, a web service that lets users do interactive analysis of massive data sets, is now available to the public. Billed as enabling customers to "analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button," the company says the data is secured, replicated across data centers, and can be easily exported.
Posted May 03, 2012
Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration software and services, has announced the latest release of its Informatica Cloud solution. Offered as an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), the latest release from Informatica features the Cloud Connector Toolkit, Cloud Integration Templates, and new enterprise features, all of which are part of the new Informatica Cloud Developer Edition and allow developers to rapidly embed end-user customizable integration logic and connectivity into cloud applications.
Posted May 01, 2012
Organizations are struggling with big data, which they define as any large-size data store that becomes unmanageable by standard technologies or methods, according to a new survey of 264 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with MarkLogic in January 2012. Among the key findings uncovered by the survey is the fact that unstructured data is on the rise, and ready to engulf current data management systems. Added to that concern, say respondents, is their belief that management does not understand the challenge that is looming, and is failing to recognize the significance of unstructured data assets to the business.
Posted May 01, 2012
Open source business analytics provider Pentaho has released Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5, providing customers with new user-driven, interactive visualizations as well as expanded analytics capabilities that can access all sources of data. The product merges data integration with business analytics in one platform. The combination of data integration and business analytics, "allows the relationship between line-of-business and IT to come closer together," Donna Prlich, director of product and solutions marketing at Pentaho, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 01, 2012
Oracle addressed the need to make IT infrastructure and business analytics technologies simpler and more efficient in a presentation to OpenWorld Tokyo 2012 attendees that was also made available via live webcast. In addition to presenting its strategy and plans for business analytics, the company also unveiled new additions to its product portfolio. In his keynote address, Oracle president Mark Hurd explained how the business users of tomorrow will require faster and more comprehensive information access. "The true question with analytics is how to get the right information to the right person at the right time to make the right decision," he said.
Posted April 26, 2012
IBM has introduced DB2 10 and InfoSphere Warehouse 10 software that integrates with big data systems, automatically compresses data into tighter spaces to prevent storage sprawl, and slices information from the past, present, and future to eliminate expensive application code. Over the past 4 years, more than 100 clients, 200 business partners, and hundreds of experts from IBM Research and Software Development Labs around the world collaborated to develop the new software.
Posted April 26, 2012
MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the MapR distribution for Apache Hadoop, has introduced new data connection options for Hadoop to enable a range of data ingress and egress alternatives for customers. These include direct file-based access using standard tools and file-based applications, direct database connectivity, Hadoop specific connectors via Sqoop, Flume and Hive; as well as direct access to popular data warehouses and applications using custom connectors. Additionally, technology providers Pentaho and Talend are partnering with MapR to provide direct integration with MapR's distribution, and MapR has also entered into a partnership with data warehouse and business intelligence platform vendor Tableau Software.
Posted April 26, 2012
Helping customers manage the influx of mobile devices, networks and applications in the enterprise, SAP has unveiled a new release of the Afaria mobile device management solution. With the 7.0 release of Afaria, SAP aims to allow enterprise IT to more effectively manage mobile applications and devices through a new user interface (UI) for simplified administration, improved workflow and enterprise integration capabilities. "The consumerization of IT is driving our innovation path and commitment to providing customers with the industry's most comprehensive, robust and streamlined mobility management platform, including mobile device management," says Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP.
Posted April 26, 2012
Oracle has announced a major new release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, an integrated applications suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Enhancements in the 9.1 release focus on three main areas - usability and productivity, deeper industry-specific functionality, and greater support for global operations and compliance, Bob Monahan, senior director of product strategy and product management of JD Edwards, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 25, 2012
SAP unveiled its roadmap for the database and mobile markets. At a press conference in San Francisco that was also made available online, Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of the SAP executive Board, Technology & Innovation, said the company's vision for the SAP real-time data platform includes the SAP HANA platform, Sybase data management offerings, and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). "In our minds, and in our customers' minds there is now absolutely no doubt that HANA represents the database architecture for the future, for OLTP and OLAP, for analyzing structured and unstructured data, for legacy applications and for new applications," Sikka told the audience.
Posted April 25, 2012
In a move intended to drive innovation in mobile solutions, SAP announced plans to acquire Syclo, a provider of enterprise mobile applications and technologies. The addition of Syclo's expertise in building and selling mobile solutions in industries such as utilities, oil & gas, life sciences and manufacturing is expected to enhance SAP mobile solutions. It is also expected to help accelerate the adoption and deployment of new mobile asset management and field service solutions on the Sybase Unwired Platform, part of the SAP mobile platform and the company's infrastructure for developing and managing mobile apps.
Posted April 25, 2012
Pitney Bowes Software, a provider of customer data, analytics and communications management solutions, has released Portrait Explorer, a solution to enable business users deploy big data analytics. The tool organizes otherwise complex customer data stores into an intuitive library of "customer cards" that the company claims is as easy to navigate and operate as one's digital photo album. "The look and feel is immediately intuitive because it looks and feels just like your digital photo album," Jeff Nicholson, vice president of global marketing for Pitney Bowes, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 17, 2012
IBM today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Varicent Software, a provider of analytics software for compensation and sales performance management. Varicent is a privately held company, with headquarters in Toronto, Canada. Financial terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2012, were not disclosed. "Varicent expands IBM's analytics portfolio into the sales function of organizations," Paul Hill, vice president, Performance Management, Business Analytics, IBM, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is a line-of-business play."
Posted April 13, 2012
IBM introduced PureSystems, a new family of "expert integrated systems," with built-in expertise based on IBM's decades of experience running IT operations for tens of thousands of clients in 170 countries. With the aim of integrating all IT elements, both physical and virtual, IBM says the new systems offer clients an alternative to today's enterprise computing model, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain. According to IBM, PureSystems is the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over 4 years.
Posted April 11, 2012
Oracle extended its Business Analytics portfolio, with the announcement of two new Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Oracle Manufacturing Analytics and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Analytics. According to Oracle, these are the first and only analytic applications for manufacturing and asset management analysis and will enable customers and partners serving manufacturing, energy production, utilities and other asset-intensive industries to gain better insights and make decisions faster. Oracle says both solutions provide support for large numbers of concurrent users and are certified to run on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. Native support for tablet and mobile devices, such as the Apple iPad and iPhone is also provided.
Posted April 11, 2012
Attivio and TIBCO Software Inc. have announced that, as part of a new partnership agreement, the TIBCO Spotfire analytics platform has achieved the highest level of information access available within Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE). According to Attivio, its AIE ingests all types of structured data and unstructured content, and unlike a traditional data warehouse, does not require relationships between any data or content to be defined in advance prior to ingestion. In achieving platinum-level certification, Attivio says TIBCO Spotfire has been authenticated by Attivio to be able to present, analyze, access and leverage AIE's AI-SQL capabilities to provide data visualization, enhanced analytics of unstructured content and intuitive search and discovery, all in the same dashboard.
Posted April 10, 2012
Oracle Corporation announced that GAAP total revenues for fiscal 2012 Q3, which ended Feb. 28, were up 3% to $9.0 billion, and non-GAAP total revenues were up 3% to $9.1 billion. Among the highlights for the quarter were Oracle's engineered systems. Hardware revenue for engineered systems grew 139% in the third quarter and bookings are strong going into the fourth quarter, said Oracle president Mark Hurd in a statement released by the company with the announcement of its quarterly financial results.
Posted April 04, 2012
First introduced at Oracle OpenWorld, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, a high-speed engineered system featuring in-memory business intelligence software and hardware, is now generally available. Oracle Exalytics features Oracle BI Foundation Suite 11.6, which includes 87 new product capabilities and enhancements, and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics, enhanced for an Oracle Sun server designed for in-memory analytics. Exalytics has had the fastest launch of any engineered system that Oracle has introduced and is already being well accepted in the U.S. and Europe, and ramping up now in Asia, said Mark Hurd, Oracle president, during the company's recent third quarter earnings call.
Posted April 04, 2012
ClearStory Data has announced an investment from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures as well as individual investors. The company aims to help business users conduct self-driven big data exploration - making it easier to gather and explore big, diverse, dispersed data from corporate data sources, Hadoop and the web so that they can gain quick insights and discover new business opportunities. "In 2011, the global output of data increased 62%, yet there's a massive shortage in the number of qualified data professionals to process this data," said Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, CEO and founder of ClearStory Data.
Posted April 03, 2012
Simba Technologies Inc., a provider of relational and multi-dimensional data connectivity solutions, has announced that its JDBC Driver for SalesForce.com has been licensed by SAP AG. The solution enables advanced, cloud-based reporting and analysis on SalesForce CRM data in real-time. Simba's JDBC Driver for SalesForce.com will be included with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) OnDemand solution to provide live connectivity to SalesForce.com.
Posted March 29, 2012
Oracle has unveiled release 20.2 of Oracle AutoVue, an enterprise visualization solution to help customers in the energy, public sector, high tech and manufacturing industries increase operational efficiency and capitalize on information. "The goal is really to unlock the technical data and let it flow throughout the lifecycle so people can make the best decisions possible," Celine Beck, manager of Product Management and Strategy, Oracle AutoVue, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted March 28, 2012
There's no question that cloud computing is a hot commodity these days. Companies of all types and sizes are embracing cloud computing-both internally and from external service providers - as a way to cost-effectively build new capabilities. With the rapid growth of cloud comes new questions about responsibility within organizations, in terms of how services will be paid for, who has ultimate say over cloud decisions, and how cloud fits into the overall strategic direction of the business.
Posted March 28, 2012
Citrusleaf, a real-time, distributed NoSQL database technology provider, has announced the immediate availability of Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR), a new product that enables flexibility for running real-time applications easily and seamlessly from different data centers. XDR runs on Citrusleaf 2.0, the company's flagship database platform for high-volume, data-intensive, web-scale and mobile businesses such as digital advertising.
Posted March 28, 2012
RainStor, a provider of big data management software, is joining with IBM in the big data market. RainStor will work with IBM to deliver a solution that combines IBM's enterprise-class, Hadoop-based product, InfoSphere BigInsights, with RainStor's Big Data Analytics on Hadoop product to enable faster, more flexible analytics on multi-structured data, without the need to move data out of the Hadoop environment. According to the vendors, the new combined solution can reduce the TCO for customers by significantly reducing physical storage, and also improving the performance of querying and analyzing big data sets across the enterprise.
Posted March 27, 2012
1010data, Inc., provider of an internet-based big data warehouse, has announced the launch of a new software tool that enables 1010data's customers to automatically segment and analyze huge consumer transaction databases and produce statistical models with specificity, even to the level of social groups, families and individuals. For the first stage of the launch, 1010data is making the tool available in an invitational beta release for retail, consumer goods, and mobile telecom companies. "In all consumer-driven industries, customers are demanding to be treated as individuals, not boomers, tweeners, or dinks - dual income, no kids," said Tim Negris, vice president of marketing at 1010data.
Posted March 22, 2012
IBM has announced new consulting services and software to address the emerging opportunities of big data to manage financial operations, decrease fraud and improve customer relationships. The new solutions target the highest-priority issues of C-suite decision makers and combine innovations developed by IBM Research with new predictive technologies from dozens of companies IBM has acquired.
Posted March 21, 2012
Datameer, Inc., a provider of end user analytics solutions built on Apache Hadoop, has introduced Datameer 1.4, which adds new functionality in the areas of data management including partitioning, user and data security as well as expanded support for data source adaptors, and support for new versions of Hadoop from Cloudera and IBM. "This release is our most ambitious engineering effort since Version 1.0 and was driven primarily by input from our customers," said Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer.
Posted March 21, 2012
Social media business intelligence is on the rise, according to a new Unisphere Research study sponsored by IBM and Marist College. The study found that while social media monitoring and analysis is in its early stages, many organizations plan to monitor, collect, stage and analyze this data over the next 1 to 5 years and. In particular, LOB respondents, who are closer to customers, show appreciation for the benefits of monitoring SMNs.
Posted March 21, 2012
MarkLogic Corporation has joined the technology partner program of Hortonworks, a leading vendor promoting the development and support of Apache Hadoop. According to the vendors, by leveraging MarkLogic and Hortonworks, organizations will be able to seamlessly combine the power of MapReduce with MarkLogic's real-time, interactive analysis and indexing on a single, unified platform. There are two main reasons that MarkLogic has chosen to partner with Hortonworks, says Justin Makeig, senior product manager at MarkLogic. One is Hortenworks' extensive experience with Hadoop installations and the second is that its core product is 100% open source.
Posted March 21, 2012
All the major extensions to the Spring Framework are now compatible with Spring 3.1, the latest version of the open source Java development framework, according to VMware. Spring Integration, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Data, Spring Mobile and Spring for Android all now support Spring 3.1, making it easier and faster for enterprise developers to build the next generation of enterprise applications. "The latest release of the Spring Framework and its major extensions continue the tradition of taking care of the infrastructure so developers can focus on building applications that address today's business requirements," Adrian Colyer, CTO Cloud and Application Services, VMware.
Posted March 20, 2012
SAS, a provider of business analytics software and services, has updated its Enterprise Data Integration Server to include support for the popular open source data framework Apache Hadoop. This integration not only brings the power of SAS analytics to Hadoop, but also makes it easier for SAS customers to use and manage Hadoop effectively along with their existing data sources, thus enhancing the value of customers' big data.
Posted March 20, 2012
For enterprises grappling with the onslaught of big data, a new platform has emerged from the open source world that promises to provide a cost-effective way to store and process petabytes and petabytes worth of information. Hadoop, an Apache project, is already being eagerly embraced by data managers and technologists as a way to manage and analyze mountains of data streaming in from websites and devices. Running data such as weblogs through traditional platforms such as data warehouses or standard analytical toolsets often cannot be cost-justified, as these solutions tend to have high overhead costs. However, organizations are beginning to recognize that such information ultimately can be of tremendous value to the business. Hadoop packages up such data and makes it digestible.
Posted March 19, 2012
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, a high-speed engineered system featuring in-memory business intelligence software and hardware. Oracle Exalytics features a new release of Oracle BI Foundation Suite and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics enhanced for an Oracle Sun server designed for in-memory analytics. According to Oracle, the interactive real-time analysis enabled by Oracle Exalytics, is intended to enable organizations to maximize profitability, increase revenues and market share, and react more quickly to changing business conditions.
Posted March 14, 2012
Attunity Ltd., a provider of real-time data integration software, and Hortonworks, a commercial vendor promoting the development and support of Apache Hadoop, are collaborating to enable high-performance delivery of big data in and out of Apache Hadoop, thus providing enterprises with real-time business intelligence and analytics, both in the cloud and across data centers.
Posted March 13, 2012
Talend, a provider of open source integration software, has announced the availability of Talend Open Studio for Big Data, to be released under the Apache Software License. Talend Open Studio for Big Data is based on Talend Open Studio, augmented with native support for Apache Hadoop. In addition, Talend Open Studio for Big Data will be bundled in Hortonworks' Apache Hadoop distribution, Hortonworks Data Platform, constituting a key integration component of Hortonworks Data Platform.
Posted March 13, 2012