Business Intelligence News & Articles

Extending its information management and enterprise content management capabilities once again, IBM (news, site)  has just announced the acquisition of Initiate Systems, a provider of data integrity software for information sharing among healthcare and government organizations.

Wouldn't it be nice if analytics were easier to understand? Quantivo thinks so, and their missing-link type solution – Quantivo 4 – attempts to achieve this by reducing data down to child’s play. 

IBM (news, site) has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement for the acquisition of information management and analytics provider NICS. The financial details of the deal were not released.

The recently announced acquisition of Guardium by IBM (news, site) which is to be integrated into the Information Management Software portfolio, is the latest extension of IBM's business analytics strategy with investment to date reckoned to be close to US $12 billion.

“Imagine a virtual war room,” says SAP (news, site) of their upcoming potential Google Wave competitor. The private beta version of the cloud-based application (codenamed Constellation) is called 12Sprints, and promises to expedite the decision making process for business users with pre-defined tools.

IBM (news, site) has been braving the strong winds of the analytics industry lately, trying to propose a better way of managing unstructured and structured content in combination with analytics used for business intelligence and more insight into web content.

Several new analytics offerings were released as a result, including IBM Cognos Content Analytics and IBM InfoSphere Content Assessment.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud (and more investment) is the latest one to be released as part of the new service line -- IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Services.

A company getting a lot of attention these days is Attivio. And not just because it's packed with former FAST search executives, but because it offers a solution that will provide you a 360 degree view of your customer by bringing together enterprise search and business intelligence/data warehousing information. It's called Unified Information Access and it helps you understand exactly what your customer is saying. 

CMSWire spoke with Andrew McKay, Senior Vice President and MaryAnne Sinville, VP Marketing at Attivio to get a view into the world of Unified Information Access and a look at the Active Intelligence Engine.

Forrester (news, site) recently asked how much of what you know about your business ecosystem comes from controlled, structured sources like surveys, product registration forms, customer interviews and market reports? If the answer is "just about everything," then you're leaving a huge amount of data on the table and then tossing it in the trash.

This data is in the form of unstructured content in social media, email, call center notes, help desk tickets, news articles, patent applications, contracts and more. The problem is that even if you want to take all of this data seriously, it's impractical to hire enough people to sort through and classify it.
 

 Well, when Box.net and Salesforce.com announced their partnership last week, we said it illustrated a growing trend toward providing applications on existing Software-as-a-Service platforms. Here to back us up this week is another Salesforce.com partnership, but this one might have a bit more volume, as it's with Adobe (news, site).

To put it simply, developers can now create applications featuring their Salesforce.com data using Adobe Flash technology. Adobe Air is available for desktop applications as well. Apply the popularity that desktop applications such as Tweetdeck have received to an an application that can utilize the vast amount of information available in any given Salesforce.com account, and things get pretty interesting, right? See here for a demo:

But don't got too excited just yet; the fruit from the Adobe/Salesforce.com womb is still in its preview stage. There's no doubt, however, that this particular combo is going to give developers a new and very exciting reason to flex their talents.

From another angle, it's also interesting to see Adobe making moves toward what looks like a business-centric style (remember their gobbling up of Omniture). If you've got your head in your hands over it because you're trying to figure out what it all means for the bigger picture, don't worry, we're in the boat with you.

For now, it's safe to say the Enterprise is about to swell with third party applications, much like our social and browser environments. How will it pan out? Well, keep up with us here and let's find out. 

Socialcast (news, site) seems to've echoed various vendors' recent-and very successful-forays into providing solutions for revealing what goes on behind the scenes of enterprise microblogging.

Their new analytics software, Social Business Intelligence (SBI), gauges social activity within company walls and scrutinizes interactivity patterns between users. Such deep digging allows the tool to cut out the useless chitchat and focus solely on valuable discussions.

We've been focused on learning about the upcoming versions of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. But Microsoft also has another product just out as a CTP (community technology preview) -- SQL Server 2008 R2.

Originally codenamed SQL Server Kilimanjaro, SQL Server 2008 R2 has a number of new features and functionality that will focus on business intelligence and reporting.

If size matters, then Oracle (news, site) certainly hangs out with the popular crowd. In recent news, the whale of an enterprise software company unveiled a WebCenter Suite, updated its collaboration platform, and added Datawatch to its growing collection of partners. 

Partnerships. What glorious things. But why stop there? Oracle sure hasn't. Yesterday the company announced their purchase of San Francisco's GoldenGate Software, providers of real-time integration software and a partner of Oracle's for more than a decade.

"With the addition of GoldenGate, Oracle expects to help our customers achieve better performance through improved business intelligence and business continuity with real-time information," said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president of Oracle's Fusion Middleware Product Development.

Buying up companies isn't something new for Oracle. In fact, the software giant has purchased roughly three dozen over the past five years, spending, as reported by Reuters, more than US$ 34 billion. And again, they're not stopping there. Oracle also has plans to purchase Sun Microsystems, and Virtual Iron as well.

If only we all had that much money to blow, right? Live vicariously through Oracle's fat wallet here.

Along with the recent launch of Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware 11g from Oracle (news, site) came a little something extra for business users and IT.

Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g is described by the company as a modern enterprise portal platform, and aims to bring together people in organizations with the business processes and information they require.

Though it was only yesterday that Bluenog (news, site) announced the newest iteration of their integrated collaborative environment, better known as Bluenog ICE, the company is already back with more exciting news. Good Samaritans that they are, Bluenog plans to contribute back the enhancements it made to various open source projects during the development phase of Bluenog ICE 4.5.

Simply put, Bluenog ICE is a mash-up of an open source content management system, portal and business intelligence tools. The juiciest part of 4.5 is arguably the inclusion of wikis, thanks to the JSPWiki Open Source Project. Accordingly, initial contributions will center on JSPWiki, which also adds support for page level permissions. Bedework, the open source system responsible for ICE 4.5’s calendaring application, will reportedly also get some early play.

"Our contributions will make it easier for the open source community to use projects such as JetSpeed, Apache, Eclipse and JSPWiki and leverage the expertise and production-ready enhancements Bluenog has developed,” Said Suresh Kuppusamy, CEO and co-founder, Bluenog. “This will help shorten development lifecycles and improve the quality and reliability of applications based on these projects."

No complaints here; although, considering the fact that Bluenog ICE won’t be released to the general public until June 30th, tidbits like this probably only feed the fervor of all you hardcore fans. Sorry about that.

The best we can do for now is suggest you wipe the drool off your lip and follow the latest Bluenog news here. 

We imagine the creation of Bluenog’s (news, site) flagship solution went down a little like this: Someone was tired of switching between their portal, content management system and business intelligence tools, so they threw all three into a melting pot, stirred it up, and *BAM!* out popped Bluenog ICE.

OK, so maybe that’s not how it went. Whatever the case, the recipe is still a stellar one, and the recognition the company’s received certainly proves it. Today at Boston's Enterprise 2.0 conference Bluenog announced that ICE is back for another round, this time as version 4.5. The new software includes an Enterprise Wiki, secure group calendaring features and enhanced centralized administration.