EMC announced Tuesday that it has acquired application development consultancy, Pivotal Labs , which will help Greenplum customers more quickly develop software for big data business analytics through the use of methodologies and programming frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.

The burgeoning tech industry movement around big data is churning up a variety of new applications, but remains an evolving field that faces lingering challenges, judging from an event held Wednesday at a Microsoft research facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open-source statistical modeling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It announced a new Advanced Analytics product on Wednesday that ties R to its database and family of software-hardware appliances.

Sybase is hoping its IQ analytic database can make its mark in the burgeoning "Big Data" market with an array of new features, including native integration with the open-source MapReduce and Hadoop programming frameworks for large-scale data processing.

Oracle unveiled the Big Data Appliance, the newest addition to its line of products that combine software and hardware, during the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday.

A second technology making a significant impact on solving Big Data problems is in-memory computing, which takes workloads that were traditionally resident on disk-based storage and moves them into main memory. This delivers a performance improvement many times above that which has been possible previously.

According to IDC’s Digital Universe report the data created globally on an annual basis will leap from 1.2 zettabytes this year to 35 zettabytes in 2020 (one zettabyte is equal to one billion terabytes).