Hadoop and unstructured data analytics managed to turn into a rapidly-growing trend in just a few years–a trend that’s taking the business intelligence software market with it as it pushes forward.  Enterprises have begun exploring new opportunities to extract value out of their data, and IT vendors are promptly following with new solutions to answer these demands, each with their own angle.

Informatica is one of those vendors. On November 2 the company introduced HParser, the first data parsing solution developed for Hadoop distributions. The solution lowers the workload ingested by the Hadoop deployment and simplifies the whole process, partially  thanks to tools such as a graphic IDE. Revolution Analytics has also jumped aboard the Hadoop bandwagon not too long ago, extending support to the analytics engine with v5 of its software.   Revolution R 5.0 features MapReduce support to enhance performance, in addition to other open aspects that are a part of a wider push in IT going on today.

Social BI

An industry that’s readily benefiting from BI trends is marketing, and a plethora of companies have forged new channels through this emerging industry.  Brightedge is a major player in establishing BI trends in marketing, helping to analyze the unstoppable data deluge, but also helping to determine the right things to measure in the first place, particularly for Facebook.

Brightedge leverages Hadoop to power some of the functions in determining how their clients’ rank is affected, as well as the effectiveness of their content.  One of Brightedge’s most recent product launches was S3, an application offering a unified cloud-based solution for site, search and social marketing.  BrightEdge is looking to create a one-stop shop for insight and actionable items, putting comprehension and forward-moving developments behind its data analysis tools.

“We launched a function called social site audit, built with guidance from Facebook,” says Brightedge’s Brad Mattick.  “We heard from clients that OpenGraph is great, but how does one check and measure success?  We created this tool to allow clients to check entire websites to see how well they’re implementing things like OpenGraph.  With this they can uncover challenges and prioritize their next steps.  We offer recommendations to help them improve.”

Smaller scale innovations

While some BI software providers are moving towards the open-source space with Hadoop, several new players are going in other directions. One of them is Quantivo, a startup working on an upcoming data-analytics-as-service for SMBs that puts an emphasis on the cost-efficiency Hadoop fails to provide on smaller scales.

Several solution providers have been innovating around analytics; something that is evidently moving the rest of the business intelligence forward as well. SAP’s in-memory HANA database is designed to deliver superior performance for large-scale analytics jobs, and  now the company has plans to integrate this architecture with the rest of its application portfolio. Jeff Kelly had the story this week.

Enterprises are looking into new ways to tap the growing amounts of data massing up by the day, motivated by the impact on business insight and consequent value.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher