University BI platform gets funding

Sheffield Hallam University, UK, was granted European Commission funding for development of a platform combining semantic technologies with business intelligence (BI) to give companies visual tools, which would help better understand data, reports ZDNet.

The university has secured 370 000 euros of the four-million-euro pot for the collaborative project, which is being led by the German enterprise software company SAP.

Semantic technologies are built around concepts driven by the semantic Web, which aims to make it easier for computers to extract and process data from objects online. The semantic Web project is overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Twentysix New York, a data management firm specialising in BI and custom, has been taken over by Tallan, says TMCnet.

With more than 25 years of experience under its belt, Tallan, a professional services firm in custom application development, BI and systems integration, announced the successful completion of its acquisition.

Both companies are Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. The twentysix New York office in midtown Manhattan will expand Tallan's presence in the city.

BI software vendor and support provider Actuate rolled out an upgrade of its BI offering for users of IBM's Maximo asset management application, reveals Managing Automation.

Actuate said it will migrate the BI toolset it provides to Maximo users as an IBM partner to the BI reporting tools (BIRT) suite of open source products from the Actuate Reports legacy toolset.

BIRT, which includes a BI report development environment plus dashboard and visualisation tools, will now be part of the latest release of Maximo 7. Users of Maximo 6 can also upgrade to the BIRT suite.