We hear a lot about big data, but collecting lots of information is of no use unless you’re able to get some practical benefit from it.

Business intelligence platform Looker is expanding its support for big data with new products supporting SQL query engines Presto and Spark as well as updates elsewhere.

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Accurately modeling consumer behavior and the events that drive and inhibit sales is a tricky problem for retailers.

Specialist in IT operation and security analytics Prelert, has turned its expertise on the problem and is launching a new Retail Order Analytics solution. It's aimed at helping online and multichannel retailers to identify technical and operational issues as they're happening in order to stem losses and protect revenue streams.

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Mobile usage is continuing to explode and is taking up significantly more of people’s time than desktop and other media, according to eMarketer. Mobile applications account for 89 percent of consumer media time in mobile, according to Nielson.

Today’s mobile usage landscape creates a new set of challenges for companies including more competition than ever for users to choose and use their applications. As a result, companies are racing to develop apps to take advantage of this growth, but many don’t have the right analytics in place to adequately measure their effectiveness. As such, companies investing in mobile app development should always optimize their apps using mobile analytics, or risk being unclear on their apps’ reach, engagement and if it is performing the way it is supposed to. Here is a quick introduction to mobile app analytics and why they are so important to businesses.

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Microsoft has announced that it has acquired Metanautix, a startup company that was developing its Quest data compute engine which aims to help large enterprises filter through their vast amounts of in-house data.

Metanautix, which was co-founded in 2012 by Theo Vassilakis and Toli Lerios, was launched in September 2014 after raising $7 million of funding after Quest had been two years in development.

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Sales teams are often saddled with outdated analytics and reporting which means that they lack a clear understanding of what's needed to drive the sales process forward.

Smart sales specialist TAS Group is launching a new Sales Performance Manager as part of its Dealmaker platform, which is aimed at helping sales leaders and their teams manage every aspect of their sales pipeline and performance with built-in knowledge and insights to help guide their decisions.

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While most organizations are primarily focused on technology and tools, it's people who translate data and insights from analytics into business outcomes.

This is a key finding of a new report by Forbes Insights and professional services organization EY which shows that people and culture are critical to realizing business value from data and analytics.

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Security analysts can struggle to cope with the large volumes of alerts generated by multiple security tools. This can make it hard to distinguish anomalies from genuine malicious actions.

To provide organizations with additional context and more accuracy to detect malicious attacks, even those that originate internally, security analytics specialist Niara is launching a new version of its platform to deliver user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) on network packet and flow data, in addition to log data.

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The level of accuracy in predictive analytics relies heavily on the quality of data. However, it is often overlooked that the quality of data relies on an organization’s ability to seamlessly integrate with the various systems that collect unique customer data, as well as the ability to analyze the data in context. Predictive analytics can come up short if the data remains in silos across the organization (the web team sees website analytics, loyalty teams see membership levels, marketing team sees email conversions, etc.).

I spoke to Dominik Dahlem, Senior Data Scientist at Boxever -- a customer intelligence and predictive marketing company for airlines and travel retailers -- about the past, present, and future of predictive analytics.

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The rapid growth of mobility and the Internet of Things is driving a need for real-time data analysis, and intensifying demand for faster insight and action in the enterprise.

In response to this demand, database specialist VoltDB is announcing version 5.6 of its SQL in-memory operational database, a fast data platform that combines streaming analytics with transactions to support mission-critical, real-time applications.

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Businesses are increasingly dealing with a mix of data, both real time and historical, and stored locally and in the cloud. This can mean that they end up having to use a mix of analytic tools.

Visual analytics specialist Zoomdata is announcing its AnyCloud initiative, which enables enterprises to visually interact with all data in the enterprise, whether on-premise or in the cloud.

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Data is the lifeblood of business, but getting the answers to key questions from it can be time consuming and costly as it needs specialist tools and expert analysis.

Analytics specialist Looker is trying to simplify the process of gaining insights from data with the release of a new product called Looker Blocks.

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For IT teams to deliver reliable systems with high availability they need to be able to spot problems and potential problems early. These challenges are greater as systems move to the cloud and software-defined data centers.

Operations analytics specialist Continuity Software is launching the latest version of its AvailabilityGuard software, providing enterprise IT teams with advanced predictive analytics, risk detection, and outage prevention capabilities.

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Everyday humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, according to IBM. This data comes from virtually everywhere -- sensors used to gather environmental information, posts to social media sites, cell phone signals and more. In order to best determine how to put this data to use in meaningful ways, the science of analytics has changed (think: the amount of data that can be analyzed, the tools and methodologies that enable us to do so, etc.). Most importantly, companies can now be predictive based on data analytics, enabling them to better forecast demands and proactively prevent certain issues.

I spoke to Murali Nadarajah, Global Head of Big Data Analytics for Xchanging, a publicly listed multi-national business technology and services provider, about how organizations today are using predictive analytics, and how the ability to be predictive has -- and will continue -- to change the business landscape enabling the development of new approaches and products.

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Business intelligence has traditionally relied on centralized data, an approach which is not only time consuming but also represents a barrier to end-user self-service.

Now cloud analytics specialist Birst is launching a new Networked BI technology which aims to redefine the way BI is delivered and consumed by enabling global control with local execution.

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Increasingly businesses are turning to the cloud or to hybrid solutions for their IT. But this can make it harder to track usage and keep control of costs.

Californian company Cloud Cruiser is launching a new CloudSmart-Now solution that allows customers to easily track hybrid cloud usage by user and keep an eye on costs with built-in analytics.

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