IBM offers social networking BI

IBM has unveiled predictive intelligence software designed specifically to analyse data from wikis, RSS feeds, blogs and social networking sources like Twitter, reports Computing.co.uk.

The company claims SPSS Modeler can merge this information into a data repository for more accuracy and insight, allowing customers to gain a wider understanding of customer relationship strategies.

The software can mine data and text for behavioural attitudes, and use predictive intelligence to assess future customer buying trends, the firm adds.

Aiming to improve user scalability and performance, MicroStrategy has unveiled MicroStrategy 9 Release 2, states TMCnet.

To improve real-time query performance, MicroStrategy accelerates performance by pre-calculating computations and placing the results into its in-memory acceleration engine, the company explains.

The MicroStrategy BI platform helps companies to expand business intelligence to growing end-user communities with rapid access to data via desktop, Web, and mobile applications.

According to two experts, the ability to ask intelligent questions of BI systems is limited by the highly structured and complex nature of the systems, writes Information Management.

“Traditional business approaches as we know them have not proven really successful,'' says Boris Evelson, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. The problem: All so-called 'business intelligence' systems are based on a complex setup of computing methodologies, processes, architectures and components, that are based on one fundamental structure: a database.

This means every question that might possibly require an answer must be figured out in advance, when setting up the data model ('pre-discovery' of questions), Evelson said. Any new question emerging in 'post-discovery' will need adjusting many parts of the system. This is why systems doing 'ad hoc analysis' by putting needed data in readily searchable memory are gaining ground.