The week is off to a busy start with a series of major updates spanning both cloud computing and analytics, two of the hottest trends in the enterprise.  Oracle set the pace for the day, confirming the acquisition of Micros Systems for $5.3 million, the most it’s paid for a company since buying out Sun in 2010 to the tune of approximately $7.3 billion.

Setting the right priorities

The Columbia, Maryland-based Micros focuses exclusively on developing solutions for the hospitality and retail industries, offering a wide variety of products ranging from point-of-sale systems to solutions with much greater strategic importance to Oracle, notably on-premise management software and managed services. The deal, rumors of which originally surfaced last week following insider leaks, represents an important landmark in the database maker’s long-term plans to reverse a series  of disappointing quarters largely attributed to its late entry into the cloud scene.

With more than 330,000 deployments sites across 180 countries and total sales of $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2013, Micros is a valuable addition to Oracle’s enterprise quiver. The deal will help offset the firm’s shrinking hardware and maintenance revenue streams with much-needed cloud income, giving CEO Larry Ellison and the rest of the leadership team more breathing room to formulate a cohesive strategy for catching up to rivals.

The acquisition of Micro underscores the growing industry focus on enabling more effective management of technology assets at the organization level, be they data centers, hardware devices or public cloud resources. Reining in the unauthorized use of the latter, a phenomenon known as “shadow IT”, has become an especially major focus in recent years.

Harnessing analytics

The need to rein in shadow IT has become so big of a priority, in fact, that it spawned an entire wave of startups committed to helping CIOs bring the cloud under control. In a milestone for the segment, Skyhigh, one of the youngest yet fastest growing players in this space, bagged $40 million in Series C financing from prominent Silicon Valley investors Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. Cloud titan Salesforce.com also contributed to the round, which brings the firm’s total to an impressive $66.5 million.

Skyhigh said that the new funding will be used to hire more employees and accelerate the development of its flagship cloud service, which provides capabilities for monitoring and controlling the use of other cloud services throughout an organization. The platform makes extensive use of analytics to track employee demand and proactively make recommendations about useful offerings, identify cost savings opportunities and spot security breaches as well as insider threats.

Meanwhile, real-time analytics firm Elasticsearch, fresh off its own Series C funding round, has introduced an improved Hadoop connector for its flagship ELK log management and data visualization stack. Just as significantly, the company had its software certified for use in environments running Cloudera’s version of the batch processing framework, which means that the platform is now compatible with all three major distributions.

Elasticsearch claims that ELK empowers business users to rapidly extract useful knowledge from their organizations’ vast information troves. Veteran data management firm Helm360 promises to provide the same functionality via its newly launched Terminus business intelligence suite,  which is similarly designed to let decision makers uncover insights across disparate silos. The offering packs a collection of dashboards that Helm360 says provide relevant context into specific data points depending on the user’s role and includes a complementary metrics library that encompasses areas such as business performance, growth and profitability.

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