Luminar is an emerging player in the analytics space that is poised to play a big part in the 2012 presidential election.

The company touts itself as the first big data firm that focuses on the U.S’s Latino population, and it’s now offering politicians the opportunity to gain a better insight into this key demographic.  Luminar took the opportunity and published some new statistics about Denver region this week: the numbers reveal a number of trends, including an age break down and the key audiences that candidates should be targeting – young Latinas that consider Spanish as their primary language for one.

While Luminar is helping officials’ to boost their PR, other vendors are supplying government agencies with big data tech to achieve better results on an operational level. Big Blue is making it easier for authorities to manage their sewer systems, while an Israeli startup is offering a SaaS platform that helps utilities get a better view of their water supplies.

Twitter also had an update this week. The social network is introducing a new targeted ad system that will allow marketers to send tweets to users based on metrics such as their browsing history and Following list. The ads have the same look as the regular promoted tweets,  but will  offer advertisers a bigger bang for their buck.

Over in the enterprise Syncsort announced that its DMExpress ETL solution has been certified to run in Greenplum Database environments. Synccort also signed up for the Greenplum Catalyst Developer Program, which means Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform integration for its customers.

Not long before this update, GridIron Systems and Zettaset entered into an agreement to develop Flash-powered reference architecture for Hadoop.