IBM acquires Exeros

IBM has acquired California-based Exeros, a privately held developer of software that helps businesses sift through databases and retrieve information, states InformationWeek. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

IBM officials said Exeros' technology can help customers deal with today's data-intensive economy. "All organisations today are faced with the daunting challenge of turning massive amounts of information into insights to guide their business," Ambuj Goyal, GM of IBM's information management unit, said in a statement.

"The combination of IBM and Exeros will enable companies to more intelligently manage their data across all formats and computing platforms, creating a smarter enterprise," added Goyal.

Since acquiring Siebel in early 2006, Oracle has steadily built on that vendor's collection of Siebel Analytics applications, and with the 7.6.9 release of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, the portfolio gains two more analytics apps as well as additional integrations and upgrades, writes Intelligent Enterprise.

The two new BI applications are Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics. Each app provides predefined ETL adapters, data warehouse schemas, and dashboards and reports, with the appeal for many customers being fast-track deployment and ongoing support.

"These applications give you the technologies you need to pull information from Oracle and non-Oracle sources, do federated queries and present information in the right context," says John O'Rourke, vice-president of marketing at Oracle.

Analysing business activity data in closer to real-time, whether to identify and reduce cost centres in a given day or monitor customer response to a new marketing campaign, is helping businesses respond to the economic recession, according to SearchCIO.com.

Some CIOs are utilising existing investments to add this functionality - which users call business activity monitoring (BAM), operational BI and event-driven software.

CIOs and analysts interviewed offered a range of solutions, including data streams integrated in Microsoft SharePoint, mobile data integrated with BI portals and modestly priced monitoring tools.