Oracle and Salesforce have both made big plays over analytics this week, in a another clear sign that the use of big data will be a key battleground in the enterprise software market.
As part of the plans Oracle has launched several analytics programs including its Hadoop-enabled tool Big Data Discovery, whilst Salesforce has opened up its analytics platform Wave to mobile users.
Dan Vesset, vice president of business analytics research at IDC, said: "One type of technology will no longer suffice in supporting all the analytics use cases.
"At the same time, data management and analysis as a series of unrelated projects results in an unmanageable IT quagmire and unnecessary risks."
His firm predicts that in two years time enterprises will tend to access big data through unified architecture, connecting information storage, analysis and search functions together.
Alongside Big Data Discovery Oracle will roll out GoldenGate for Big Data, which will allow users to stream unstructured transactional data into an analytics system, as well as Big Data SQL 1.1 which will let users query data across Hadoop, NoSQL and Oracle Database.
The vendor’s NoSQL Database 3.2.5 will also help developers build applications that can query NoSQL data using SQL.
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Customers of Salesforce will be able to use Wave on mobile to import data directly into the firm’s Analytics Cloud, as well as design a data dashboard from their phones, and browse data.
"Business intelligence is now the number two priority in mobile applications for the first time ever, trailing only email," said Howard Dresner, chief research officer, Dresner Advisory Services.
"User empowerment is key right now, and cloud and mobile BI (business intelligence) solutions are providing faster channels of delivering fact-based insights to more business users at key points of decision."
