Hoping to entice more enterprises to use the R statistical programming language directly within their predictive modeling and data visualization jobs, Tibco has released a free version of its R runtime engine.

Anyone remotely within the orbit of SAP lately knows that its number-one focus is the HANA in-memory database and development platform. At this week's Sapphire conference in Orlando, the vendor sought to show the progress it is making in both building out HANA's capabilities as well as attracting developers and partners to HANA.

Experts within and outside government IT stress the role the private sector must play in helping cash-strapped federal agencies find order in their growing stockpiles of data.

A recent survey by Forrester found that 7 per cent of IT executives and 9 per cent of business leaders feel they have gained a true return on investment from Big Data. That means there's a lot more business can be doing to glean insights from the massive amount of data that's potentially available to them.

Big data may seem to promise big insights to users, but more isn't always better, cautions statistician Nate Silver, who became one of America's most well-known faces of data analysis after his FiveThirtyEight blog accurately predicted 2012 presidential election results in all 50 states.

Making use of the petabytes of patient data that healthcare organizations possess requires extracting it from legacy systems, normalizing it and then building applications that can make sense of it. That's a tall order, but the facilities that pull it off can learn a lot.

Big Data is poised to help marketers reach and engage customers and prospects in ways that businesses are only now starting to understand. Enterprises that don't embrace analytics may soon see embattled customers voting with their wallets.

Failed expectations, increased costs, unnecessary legal risks -- going blind into a big data project doesn’t pay

Traditional BI requires human input to decide what correlated factors to query. As predictive data analytics gets increasingly powerful, the algorithms do the deciding. That spells the end of BI as columnist Bernard Golden knows it - and he doesn't feel fine about it.

IT executives are starting to realize that there's little value in big data without robust analytics systems that can crunch the numbers and give key decision makers (read: their bosses) easy-to-digest information. With so few real solutions on the market, though, this is easier said than done.

Applying Big Data approaches to information security can help enterprises build better situational awareness capabilities, but implementation could prove to be a major challenge, security experts said at the RSA Conference 2013 being held here this week.