The Data Day, A few days: January 9-15, 2016

New funding for Anaplan and Looker. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, Today: May 18 2012

SAP expands HANA. Informatica embraces big data. Gary Bloom joins MarkLogic. And more.

An occasional series of data-related news, views and links posts on Too Much Information. You can also follow the series @thedataday.

* For 451 Research clients

# Informatica 9.5: ‘big data’ runs through the integration platform makeover Impact Report

# Lucid Imagination launches search-based ‘big data’ platform Impact Report

# Datameer updates Hadoop-based BI stack with an eye to more complex analysis Impact Report

# MarkLogic searches for operational analytics role with plans for SQL, MapReduce support Impact Report

# Infobright shines following shift to machine-generated data Impact Report

# Starcounter focuses on performance with in-memory database update Impact Report

# Guavus bears fruit with data-processing platform for communications operators Impact Report

# InsightSquared bags $4.5m series A funding and salesforce.com as an investor Impact Report

# MarkLogic names veteran exec Gary Bloom as new president and CEO Analyst note

* SAP Continues to Expand Capabilities and Scale of SAP HANA Platform and Ease Developer Adoption

* SAP HANA Offers Multi-Node Capabilities to Help Customers Scale Out

* Gary Bloom Joins MarkLogic as Chief Executive Officer

* Amazon RDS for SQL Server and .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

* Informatica 9.5 Unleashes the Power of Hadoop

* Informatica Brings Master Data Management to Big Data, Social, Cloud and Mobile Computing

* Talend Announces New Release of Enterprise Open Source Integration Platform

* Lucid Imagination Combines Search, Analytics and Big Data to Tackle the Problem of Dark Data

* Big Data Refinery Fuels Next-Generation Data Architecture

* 7 Key Drivers for the Big Data Market

* Google puts a price tag on Cloud SQL services

* Actuate and Hortonworks Collaborate to Visualize Big Data

* Hadapt and Cloudera Deliver Big Data Analytics with Apache Hadoop

* Cloudera Partners With Hadoop Managed Services Provider MetaScale to Help Large Traditional Enterprises Adopt Apache Hadoop

* Opera Solutions’ Big Analytics Tailor Made for SAP HANA: Signal Hub Technology

* Cloudant to Contribute Big Data Capabilities to Apache CouchDB Project

* Hortonworks and Kognitio Announce Technical Partnership

* Starcounter Unveils World’s Fastest Consistent Database

* XAP 9.0 – Geared for Real-Time Big Data Stream Processing

* How long before R overtakes SAS and SPSS?

* Betting big on live sports data, Perform lays €120 million on RunningBall

And that’s the Data Day, today.

Quick thoughts on IBM-SPSS

Quick thoughts on the deal. We will have a full report for clients tonight. This is mainly thoughts about the text analytics part and I haven’t had a chance to speak with either company at the time of writing, so bear that in mind.

  • This is long-predicted, by us and many others. I recall a chat with SAS founder and CEO Jim Goodnight a couple of years ago and he said it me – and I’m slightly paraphrasing –  in so many words, “why doesn’t IBM just buy them, I don’t understand why they haven’t already?” Well IBM finally has, or at least has made the initial move. And for $50 per share or almost $1.2bn.
  • Of course like almost every IBM deal in recent years, the two are partners, IBM signed an OEM deal for the SPSS’ PASW statistics software in Q2 and has had other deals with it going back many years.
  • IBM has text anlaytics tools, of course but they really are just that; tools. It is not a major player in text analytics applications at this juncture. The vast majority of its engagements tend to be very large, custom-based ones and are still few and far between, as far as we can gather, mostly in financial services and telecommunications.
  • SPSS, on the other hand has tools, workbenches and applications and has found  some hot spots in this area, including analyzing customer feedback surveys, in particular the open-ended questions that can provide some of the richest material in such surveys but are often ignored because they’re too manual-intensive to analyze by hand.
  • SAS Institute now has a much bigger analytics competitor. Goodnight didn’t rate SPSS much as a competitor, but IBM? That’s a bit different.
  • SAP-Business Objects must be thinking of making a move too.

More considered thoughts from myself and my fellow 451 analysts later on today.