Businesses today have access to more data about their operations and their customers than ever before, but often that data is an underused resource.

Business intelligence company GoodData today announces new platform enhancements aimed at unlocking the value of data and widely distributing analytics to the people who are making business decisions on a daily basis.

A number of major companies including IBM, Microsoft and Amazon have launched new machine learning platforms in the past year.

But data enrichment company CrowdFlower believes that to be effective and commercially viable machine learning needs more training and better data.

The Internet of Things is growing fast and as more and more enterprise applications collect IoT data, specifically time series data from sensors, they need fast, reliable and scalable read and write performance.

To best accomplish this, the data must be stored, queried and analyzed together. To enable this Basho Technologies is launching Riak TS, a distributed NoSQL database designed to aggregate and analyze massive amounts of sequenced, unstructured data generated from the IoT and other time series data sources.

Companies sometimes struggle to get value from their data. Information is often static and can’t provide insights into individual business decisions.

To help deliver better value from data, decision analytics company OnCorps is unveiling its Adaptive Decision Analytics platform that intelligently engages users and prompts them to make better decisions.

Many businesses are put off making use of big data by the costs and complexity of the software and infrastructure involved.

Enterprise data management specialist Solix Technologies is aiming to break down this barrier by making the Standard Edition of its Solix Big Data Suite available free of charge.

For the typical enterprise, running big data platforms like Hadoop and Spark is complex and resource intensive, and the challenges only increase as data volumes expand.

Big data as a service specialist Altiscale is releasing the latest version of its Hadoop and Spark platform in the cloud, offering full operations support and elastic scalability. It ensures that customers can focus on the value they get from big data, while liberating them from the hassles of data management.

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.

The complexity of the systems needed to handle it is often a major barrier to companies setting up big data projects.

A new release from big data platform BlueData aims to simplify things by offering a turnkey, purpose-built big data infrastructure solution for enterprises to accelerate their deployment times.

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.

Modern sales teams are more than ever reliant on data to help them identify opportunities and analyze performance. But can they really be confident in the accuracy of their data and are they using it effectively?

Business management platform Domo has conducted a survey of more than 400 sales leaders to find out how data impacts them in the real world.

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.

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.

Big Data promises businesses a number of advantages, but in order to harness these effectively they must first choose the right software to engage with and analyze vast quantities of information.

For many organizations, including high profile firms like Facebook and Yahoo, Hadoop is the software of choice when it comes to managing Big Data. In fact, the global Hadoop market is reported to be growing at around 55 percent a year and is expected to be worth $20.9 billion by 2018.

Decision makers at Fortune 1000 companies are increasingly seeking to make use of big data to help their IT strategy.

Analytics specialist ExtraHop has released the results of a survey conducted by research firm TechValidate which shows how organizations are evolving their IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) practices.

ISIS might be a formidable force, but you know who they can’t defeat? Robots.

Yes, that’s right, artificial intelligence is getting the better of ISIS, and according to a BBC report, researchers have used it to better understand the group’s tactics.