Business Intelligence News & Articles

It took a while to figure it out from the press release, but IBM has upgraded its SmartCloud 2.1, which comes with a number of enhancements that is going to make working with Big Blue‘s cloud a lot easier, and to all appearances, a lot more productive.

In the 2012 CODiE Awards for the Business Software Industry, SpringCM, Pervasive Software, Citrix Online and Coverity Inc. get recognized.

The problem with using data to make critical business decisions is not only that there is so much of it, but, increasingly, it’s in hard-to-reach locations -- social media, Web and cloud apps. Now, Kapow Software and Informatica Corporation are working to do something about that.

This week alone, analytics has been a hot topic. Call it what you want -- Business Intelligence, Sentiment Analysis or Social Reporting -- it can all tell you a lot about what’s going online, around your brand and your customers. Big Data isn’t just for information management. It also applies to marketing. This week also brought up Gartner’s Cool Vendors reports, one of which features those in the content analytics space. Let’s take a look at the companies that topped its list.

At J.Boye 2012, it was made clear that sharing is caring. Whether it’s information about what’s working or what isn’t, it’s essential that everyone from development teams to sales and marketing to community managers share insights so as to help everyone innovate and make improvements. Session after session, valuable information about mobile web strategy, SharePoint development and web governance were shared, giving us great insight on how we can avoid pitfalls and work smarter.

Earlier in the week, we took a look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Customer Service Contact Centers and found that business applications for the customer service and support (CSS) were obsolete in many cases. Today we will take a look at the companies that made it into the Leaders Quadrant.

Investing in business intelligence is a costly affair. Even for larger enterprises, it is not something that is entered into lightly, and before doing so, there are a number of issues that need to be considered before any decision is made. A recent white paper from Birst Software looks at those issues and what business intelligence vendors should be offering.

IBM is the acquisition trail again despite disappointing results for Q1 released last week. The results fell around the European economy, not over IBM commercial strategy. The result is that it looks like it is to keep buying what it needs, this week’s Vivisimo acquisition being a case in point.

If you were to look at the business pages of any major newspaper in the past couple of days, you’d swear IT was in meltdown. The reactions to the Q1 figures for both IBM and Intel have pushed stock markets down. However, while the stockholders might not be getting what they want -- no tears shed here -- the IT areas that we know, love and like have all performed despite difficult times in Europe.

Autonomy is back again -- along with HP of course -- for another product release that continues to expand the use of its IDOL server, this time in the media space where it has introduced what has to be one of the first, if not the first, media monitoring and analytics applications in the media vertical.

At Oracle OpenWorld in Japan, Oracle announced new BI applications certified on Oracle Exalytics and supported on iPad and iPhone devices, a new release of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System, and the general availability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery.

IBM continues to pursue its Big Data ambitions, this time with an upgrade to its flagship DB2 to v10 along with InfoSphere Warehouse 10 that integrates with Big Data systems and compresses data into tighter spaces.

As information volume and diversity continues to expand, many organizations are struggling with how gain a view that both holistic and consumable. Enterprise middleware provider TIBCO and data integration vendor Attivio have announced a new partnership that provides at least one solution.

IGLOO continues to develop its social networking suite and this time it’s with the help of MicroStrategy, which provides business intelligence and which will integrate its reporting and analytics into the suite. With it, users will be able to track participation in activities in social intranets or extranets.

You may recall earlier in the month that Microsoft announced that it was making Office 365 cheaper by up to 20%. With low-level entry barriers for its competitors such as Google and Zoho, it’s not unlikely that those prices will drop again, especially as Microsoft says it is cutting internal costs. But even with the reduced pricing, is Office 365 – and, in particular, SharePoint Online -- really for you.