SAP unveils SaaS BI offering

Seeking to significantly expand the market for business intelligence tools and services, SAP has rolled out a cloud-based offering that replaces two existing software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI products, reports ManagingAutomation.

The company's BusinessObjects BI OnDemand offering is targeted at line-of-business users who may perform data analysis using personal spreadsheets rather than secure BI tools, say company officials.

The product includes wizards that easily guide novice BI users. It also lets users combine and analyse data sets from on-premise systems, such as SAP's ERP applications and cloud-based data, as well as share data, dashboards, and other types of visualisations online.

Data warehousing appliance maker Netezza wants to integrate its TwinFins into data analytics to improve usefulness of the boxes and position them to better compete with alternatives from IBM, Oracle, and Teradata, writes TheRegister.

The TwinFin appliances integrate X64-based blade servers and home-grown accelerator chips to a heavily customised PostgreSQL database. Like other data warehouses, the Netezza appliances were designed to run ad hoc SQL queries against giant data sets.

Netezza gear offers a field programmable gate array that handles data compression and decompression as it goes on and off the disk, thereby speeding up throughput, as well as providing sophisticated data filtering so that only the relevant portions of a giant data set are passed on up to the X64 engines to run the SQL query.

Data warehousing vendor ParAccel is putting an emphasis on high-performance analytics in the upcoming version of its database appliance, states eWeek.

According to the company, the release of ParAccel Database Version 2.5 in the second quarter will be armed with a number of enhancements designed to improve performance.

ParAccel's advanced query optimiser, Omne, has been enhanced to "allow automatic decorrelation of ... broader ranges of embedded subqueries to further simplify and accelerate the development of analytic applications," says the company.