Analytics can be worthless, counterproductive and even harmful when based on data that isn’t high quality. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. So when Salesforce Analytics Cloud hit the market, vendors rushed to announce plugins that would load high-quality data into the solution.

The painful truth is that without high-quality data, it doesn’t matter how fast or sophisticated the analytics capability is. You simply won’t be able to turn all that data managed by IT into effective business execution.

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As more businesses want to take advantage of the insights that analysis of big data can offer there's greater demand for the cloud to allow direct access to stored data.

San Francisco-based big data platform specialist Datameer was the first big data analytics platform purpose built for Hadoop. Now the company is first to market with a big data analytics platform designed specifically for the cloud.

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It seems as though there have been quite a few acquisitions by the big names in tech recently, and the latest addition to Microsoft's portfolio is Equivio. The Israeli company specializes in text analytics, focusing mainly on helping other businesses with legal and compliance issues with data, counting the Department of Justice among its clients.

What Microsoft is particularly interested in is Equivio's machine learning technology and information governance tools, and aims to improve the eDiscover feature of Office 365. For any company managing large quantities of data, this will help to make life a good deal simpler, and help to eliminate the need for manually sifting through documents and emails.

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There are now many names vying to control your inbox. It is not enough to have your email delivered to the inbox of your choice now the battle is to present email in the most understandable, the most accessible, and the least cluttered way possible. IBM Verse is the latest kid on the block, as it looks to divert attention away from Google Inbox and Microsoft Clutter.

Billed as a "new way to work", IBM Verse is more than just another inbox tool -- it is a combination tool that manages email, tasks, collaboration and more. It clearly has enterprise markets in its sights as it brings communication, tasks, sharing and social features under one roof. To further differentiate it from other comparable services, IBM Verse uses advanced analytics to completely tailor itself for individual users.

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Google Analytics has become something of an industry standard for gathering web metrics. But a new report from form building company Formstack says that businesses may be concentrating on measuring the wrong things.

It suggests that users tend to focus on vanity metrics, like page views and bounce rate, but stop short of real data tracking. What they should be focusing on are the actionable GA metrics that will impact conversion rate and ultimately revenue.

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Microsoft has announced the addition of several new features to its Azure data services platform to support Apache Hadoop.

Azure HDInsight will gain support of real-time analytics for Apache Hadoop and Azure Marketplace will benefit from new machine learning capabilities.

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Enterprise software specialist SAP has announced a partnership with business intelligence company Birst to deliver faster analytics on the SAP HANA cloud platform.

The tie up will allow organizations to use a single cloud platform which can deliver instant analytics giving managers the ability to more quickly turn insight into action. It brings together SAP's next-generation cloud platform and Birst's comprehensive two-tier data architecture to provide instant access to business data.

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For a while now, verified users and advertisers have been able to check statistics about their Twitter account so they can see how many times individual tweets have been viewed, check what types of tweet encourage the most engagement, and so on. Now Twitter Analytics is available to everyone -- free of charge.

It doesn’t matter if you have a blue verified tick next to your name or not, now you can use the analytics dashboard to check the performance of tweets. While this is a useful tool for businesses, for the average Twitter user it is a tool that will satisfy an idle curiosity and provide a way to while away the time obsessing over what key phrases yield the greatest return.

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Database specialist DataStax is using the 2014 Spark Summit to announce the release of its latest product. DataStax Enterprise 4.5 includes some major updates aimed at improving ease of use and security.

Built from the ground up, upgrades in DSE 4.5 include lightning fast in-memory analytics with Spark -- thanks to a recently announced partnership with Databricks. In addition automated diagnostic and performance tuning drives operational simplicity and enhanced visual management. For the first time companies can now easily merge Cassandra data with Hadoop and avoid the complexities of data management thanks to partnerships with Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks.

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In recent days we've seen DDoS attacks hit some major names like Feedly and even force the CodeSpaces hosting service out of business.

In a bid to combat the threat presented by DDoS attacks, security specialist Corero Network Security has announced a powerful web-based analytics portal.

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The SAP HANA in-memory analytic tool can be deployed in house or in the cloud, but to get information from it users have previously had to choose between aging legacy business intelligence (BI) tools that take months to implement and require large teams to support, or limited data discovery tools that are restricted to analysts.

Now though cloud BI specialist Birst is launching a new product to make data analysis more accessible.

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When people last week started reading my IBM eBook (available Friday in paperback from Amazon and most distributors -- make Mrs. Cringely happy and send one to all your friends) the tales of IBM customer and employee woe were generally accepted as simple fact but some people had a hard time with my assertion that IBM analytics will probably not be successful (I said IBM is already too late to that party).

One especially informed reader hit me pretty hard on the topic and I think our conversation is worth repeating here. He’s asked to remain anonymous but I assure you he’s in a position to know.

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Enterprise resource planning and other business functions like financials and customer relationship management are increasingly shifting to the cloud.

NetSuite is one of the main players in this market offering a broad suite of applications. To allow NetSuite customers to get the most from their software and gain greater operational efficiency, business intelligence specialist Birst is launching a free analytics module.

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Much reporting of business metrics is still rooted in the era of static graphs and infrequent use. It's cumbersome and the information gets out of date fast.

Business planning and performance management specialist Tidemark is looking to bring reporting into the mobile and cloud era with the launch of its new Playbooks product.

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When it comes to invoicing and accounting packages for smaller enterprises QuickBooks  is one of the first names that comes to mind

Now analytics specialist InsightSquared has launched a SaaS package for QuickBooks that lets users have immediate access to financial dashboards and reports, in addition to sales & marketing data.

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