Pentaho buys LucidEra SaaS

Pentaho, a commercial open source business intelligence vendor, has acquired LucidEra's Web-based interactive reporting tools for non-technical business users, reports Intelligent Enterprise.

Pentaho says LucidEra's Clearview product would be packaged as Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition. The software will be offered as the front-end interface of Pentaho's on-premise and cloud-based analytics product line. Financial details were not disclosed.

LucidEra in June acknowledged that a sale of its assets was possible due to the company's inability to raise venture capital in the economic downturn. In the opinion of some industry observers, LucidEra offered a fairly narrow forecast-to-billing application that was most useful to Salesforce.com customers.

SocialCast is taking the wraps off a new suite of analytics for its enterprise microblogging service, designed to give executives and analysts greater insight into how the system is being used and who the most frequent users are, states InternetNews.

The Social Business Intelligence suite is a proprietary suite of analytics that SocialCast says can provide insight into real-time microblogging activity as well as informal social activity.

"As more information is exchanged along the social graph in the enterprise, it's becoming more important to learn how to leverage that and figure out who are the brokers and connectors inside a company," says Socialcast founder and CEO Tim Young. "Having these tools enables executives to derive a better sense of the business value the platform provides."

IBM has opened a centre in New York City dedicated to developing business analytics software and services, says InformationWeek.

The Business Analytics Solutions Centre will ultimately house up to 550 consultants, researchers, and experts dedicated to finding ways to help businesses and governments apply analytics technologies to better understand market conditions, demand trends, consumer data, and the like. The centre will be located in IBM's existing facilities on Manhattan's Madison Avenue.

"We're seeing an incredible opportunity for businesses, institutions, and governments to elevate the performance of all existing systems to another level via the application of advanced analytics," says Phil Guido, IBM's GM for the eastern US.