SAP is expanding the big data capabilities of its HANA in-memory system with SAP HANA Vora, an in-memory query engine that applies contextual analytics to data stored in Hadoop, enterprise systems and other distributed data sources.

Consultancy firms have been feasting on MBA talent this past year — and data analytics is fuelling their search for hires.

“We’re seeing a lot of expansion in the digital service lines that consultancy firms offer, and this is reflected in hiring,” said Stephen Pidgeon, associate director for careers at Dartmouth Tuck.

The big data wave is surging through every sector — and profound digital transformations are making it mandatory to leverage analytics. So says Massimo Beduschi, Italian CEO of WPP, the world’s biggest advertising behemoth.

“It has made profound transformations necessary in work processes and, above all else, in the training of new professional figures who are able to anticipate and lead the change,” Massimo exclaims.

Ditto Labs, the leading provider of photo analytics for social media, and Tickr, the marketing performance management platform, today announced a partnership affording marketers real-time performance metrics which, for the first time, include social media photos.

Most marketers utilize a variety of analytics platforms to track campaign success and measure brand performance, but up until this point, have been unable to analyze the content of related photos. Ditto’s computer vision technology scans user generated photos on social media and measures the occurrence of products, logos and affinities.

Big data, business intelligence, and analytics are increasingly being employed to create successful business predictions and develop smarter business model framework.

The significant increase in network connected devices such as smartphones, sensors, and detectors has led to the generation of huge volumes of distinct data, which is beyond the ability of conventional data processing applications. Such huge amount of data has given rise to the concept of big data. Big data is being used by enterprises to make informed business decisions, analyze customers' spending behavior in order to target new product lines, enhance supply chain, identify geographic trends, and gain a competitive edge over other market players.

Technavio’s latest report on the global BPO business analytics market provides an analysis of the key trends expected to impact the global BPO business analytics market through 2016-2020. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline.

International Business Machines Corp. is buying data company Truven Health Analytics Inc. for $2.6 billion, in a bid to expand its already considerable presence in the health-care industry. The deal will double the size of IBM’s Watson Health business unit to 5,000 employees as the company adds new technology services to sell to doctors and hospitals.

"We believe our commitment to making Business Intelligence easy to deploy, use and manage has been validated, with Yellowfin placed on Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BI and analytics for the third year in a row," said Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie.  "Yellowfin leads the BI industry in user adoption rates with an innovative platform designed to make data more accessible, valuable and actionable for everyone.  Yellowfin offers distinguishing Collaborative BI, Embedded BI, Cloud BI and Storytelling capabilities as well as end-user ease-of-use.