Tibco has brought its Spotfire in-memory analytics software into the burgeoning ecosystem around Hadoop, an open-source framework for processing large sets of information, the company announced Tuesday.

Thanks to optimism about the U.S. economy and some good signs from tech vendor financial reports, IT companies Friday ended their best quarter on the markets since the end of 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst and shares plunged.

Tibco has added geolocation technology to its Tibbr enterprise social-networking platform, in a move that will allow companies to use physical spaces as "data hubs," or launching points for information delivery and collection.

BI (business intelligence) vendor Tableau Software on Wednesday announced the availability of Tableau 7.0, a release that boosts speed and scale as well as providing what the company calls "human-oriented" design and accessibility.

IBM is buying Green Hat, maker of automated testing tools for integration, SOA (service oriented architecture) implementations and cloud-based deployments, the company announced Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not provided.

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.

The massive explosion in data volumes collected by many organisations has brought with it an accompanying headache in terms of putting it to gainful use. Businesses increasingly need to make quick decisions, and pressure is mounting on IT departments to provide solutions that deliver quality data much faster than has been possible before. The days of trapping information in a data warehouse for retrospective analysis are fading in favour of event-driven systems that can provide data and enable decisions in real time.

With the word ‘recession' on every-body's lips, an unprecedented collapse in the finance sector still echoing, and a year of flat IT budgets being widely predicted, you could forgive the CEO of Tibco for being a little downbeat. But Vivek Ranadivé, the boss of arguably the world's largest integration software specialist, is coming out fighting and he has some solid financial numbers with which to back himself.