IBM researchers have developed a new algorithm that could in minutes analyze terabytes' worth of raw data to more quickly predict weather and electricity usage, the company said.

SAP made a major new push into on-demand business intelligence, announcing a new suite that combines all of SAP's SaaS BI products and is aimed at "casual" users who are "underserved" by other products.

Information management giant Iron Mountain said Monday it has acquired content archiving vendor Mimosa Systems for US$112 million.

BI as a service can rapidly deliver analytic tools that give users most of what they need without the time, expense and hassle of developing a BI infrastructure internally. But the offerings -- and the business models behind them -- are still evolving.

Neo4j, Cassandra, and FluidDB represent a breed of databases that swiftly search social networking data

Staples Inc. is expanding its IT services capabilities in a move that will take it right inside the data center.

Data visualization vendor Tableau Software Inc. hopes to keep the pedal to the metal with the launch of a free service that brings sophisticated dashboards and charts to amateur spreadsheet jocks.

Sybase announced Thursday that it has purchased the assets of CEP (complex-event processing) vendor Aleri, in a move that highlights the increasing competitive stakes in the space and shores up Sybase's position in real-time analytics.

IBM will release a beta version of a software application designed to keep track of how information flows across different systems, sending alerts when source data has been altered or isn't properly ingested into some target system or report.

IBM has agreed to buy master data management vendor Initiate Systems. Terms of the deal, which is scheduled to close in the first quarter, were not disclosed.

When considering BI projects, organizations would be better off setting up an enterprise-wide data warehouse rather than running different data marts for individual projects, said Michael Jones, senior vice president of IT for the Gap clothing retailer.

The pressure on CIOs to deliver business intelligence tools and analytic applications -- on the cheap and ASAP -- has been building steadily for years. In 2010, survey results point out that that demand has reached a fever pitch with which CIOs are very familiar.

Mounting evidence suggests that in 2010, the hottest segment in BI (business intelligence) software will revolve around offerings delivered from the cloud, thanks to increased product sophistication, strained IT budgets and other factors.

Sybase's flagship database can now run entirely within memory

In a briefing today, Oracle is expected to reassure Sun customers that it will continue to invest in all of Sun's main server platforms.

An open-source MDM (master data management) suite from Talend is now available, giving companies a lower-priced option to proprietary products from the likes of Tibco, Kalido and IBM, the company announced Monday.

An open-source MDM (master data management) suite from Talend is now available, giving companies a lower-priced option to proprietary products from the likes of Tibco, Kalido and IBM, the company announced Monday.

IBM/Lotus has introduced Project Vulcan, no less than an outline for the future of its collaboration business. Can it become a hit and circle the bases at the expense of competitors such as Microsoft, Google and Cisco?

SoftMaker Office 2010 ($80, 30-day free trial) for Windows comes with the same versions of TextMaker, PlanMaker, and Presentations which come with the $60 Ashampoo Office 2010; these are covered in our review of the Ashampoo product. What SoftMaker Office 2010 has which Ashampoo does not is BasicMaker, a scripting language which can add functionality to your applications. This review focuses on that module.

On his company's 25th anniversary, Sybase CEO John Chen talks about the software vendor's rising stock price, and why the financial community is thrilled with its applications for high-speed stock trades.