A bumper crop of new analytics tools has arrived for business users over the past few weeks, and on Tuesday SAP rolled out two fresh examples. Both promising simplicity and usability for non-experts, SAP Predictive Analytics 2.0 offers updated capabilities for enterprises seeking insight into large volumes of data such as from the Internet of Things, while a new Edge edition of SAP's Lumira tool targets small and medium-size businesses with data-discovery features.

It's no secret that cloud computing and data analytics are both rapidly growing areas of IT. Put them together, and you get a winning combination that's expected to grow by more than 26 percent annually over the next five years.

In a move to beef up its portfolio of analysis software and services, Microsoft is acquiring Revolution Analytics, a major commercial distributor of the R statistical programming language.

Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for itself and others,

From ordering pizza online to pinpointing the exact location of a breaking news story, an overwhelming portion of data on the Web has geographic elements. Yet for Web developers, wrangling the most value from geospatial information remains an arduous task.

Half the money spent on advertising is wasted -- the question is, which half? That's the age-old question in adland. Now Oracle is hoping to help its customers answer that question with the acquisition of Datalogix, which collects offline consumer spending data in a bid to help online advertisers pick the right targets.

Twitter discussed its plans for more advanced video editing and publishing tools in November, and thanks to a TechCrunch report, we're getting a better idea of what that video feature may entail.

If 2014 was the year that Apache Hadoop sparked the big data revolution, 2015 may be the year that Apache Spark supplants Hadoop with its superior capabilities for richer and more timely analysis.

In a report issued today by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the management consulting firm urged Chief Marketing Officers to get more involved in data protection.

IBM and Twitter have announced a partnership that will merge Twitter's massive flows of social media data with Big Blue's analytics software, including Watson.

It turns out that a vital missing ingredient in the long-sought after goal of getting machines to think like humans -- artificial intelligence -- has been lots and lots of data.

Renault is in the midst of a global roll-out of Salesforce to be completed by March 2015, the automotive's digital and CRM manager revealed at Salesforce's flagship conference in San Francisco.

The knock against Salesforce.com has long been for its lack of robust analytics, but the company is hoping to change that perception and challenge the competition with Wave, its sixth discrete Cloud service.

It seems that a week doesn't go by these days without major software vendors announcing updates to their marketing software portfolios, and the past few days were no exception as rivals Oracle and Salesforce.com both made some news.

Microsoft is poised to release a major update to its Dynamics CRM and marketing applications in a bid to gain market share against rivals such as Salesforce.com.

American department store chain Kohl's is testing "event-based architecture" which can track online or in-store movements so it can intervene when customers are about to abandon a purchase.

Data analysis software vendor Tableau is developing a new iPad app that might solve one of the problems the company faces with expanding its reach.

Add Tibco to the list of vendors pushing a full stack of so-called "customer engagement" software, which companies use to track and analyze consumer behavior in hopes of building deeper relationships with them and ultimately, selling more products and services.

Tibco's board of directors has begun a review of "strategic and financial alternatives," which presumably include a sale, the middleware vendor has confirmed following a news report of its plans.

Teradata has made its third acquisition of a company specializing in big data within about a month, with the latest deal involving consulting firm Think Big Analytics

Salesforce.com has renamed and updated its Communities product, which lets companies build social websites where employees, partners and customers can mingle and collaborate.