IBM on Tuesday announced plans to buy Worklight, a move that will give it a range of cross-platform mobile application development technologies. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter, were not disclosed.

SAP is expected to make a slew of announcements related to in-memory computing, mobile applications and cloud-based services on Wednesday during the Sapphire conference in Madrid.

Informatica has strengthened its hand in the burgeoning market for Hadoop, the open-source programming framework for large-scale data processing, unveiling a new data parser on Wednesday that can transform piles of unstructured information into a more structured form for use in running Hadoop jobs.

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.

Development of enterprise mobile apps has been moving more slowly than development of consumer-facing apps, according to Gartner. One main reason is IT leaders' concerns about the security of mobile devices, which are often employees' personal devices, and are vulnerable to being lost, hacked or stolen. While there are plenty of established tools and practices for keeping Web visitors from straying (or hacking) into sensitive corporate data, managing security across a diverse set of mobile devices remains a challenge, IT experts say.

Now that SAP's roughly $US6 billion acquisition of Sybase has gained clearance from European regulators, it may not be long before the deal is finalised. With that in mind, users and partners of the companies have much to consider during the next few months, analysts say.

The Garvan Institute has deployed a new database platform to consolidate and centralise more than 30 separate databases as the medical research organisation moves toward a new information architecture.

Beyond the hype, some companies are moving cautiously to cloud computing. Meet the experimenters.