IBM CEO Virginia Rometty is looking to position her firm at the front end of Big Data innovation with Watson, the game show winning supercomputer that pushed the envelope on natural language processing. Big Blue is investing a massive $1 billion to create a dedicated business unit for the system that Rometty hopes will generate a tenfold return within a few years.

The newly formed division is tasked with applying the technologies that power Watson to industry-specific problems in the pharmaceutical, publishing and biotechnology sectors. The group is commercializing the software through Foundation, a toolkit that integrates cognitive computing functionality with data management capabilities to provide unified platform for ingesting and processing different types of information. Foundation is already used to power three services, including a sophisticated visualization tool, an enterprise search engine and a research automation product called Advisor that can scan millions of documents and retrieve patterns relevant to the user’s query.

Over on the database front, MongoDB was selected by insurance analytics firm RMS to power its cloud-based risk management solution. The company stores more than 100 billions documents on the platform and expects to add several trillion more, each with different property, business and policy attributes. This information is driving increased for NoSQL solutions, and in particular MongoDB, as well as structured query software that can help business users make sense of their growing data volumes.

Cloudera is addressing this trend with Impala, which it pegs as the “fastest, most functional and proven way to run SQL on Hadoop data.” A recent benchmarking test found that the solution processes up to 69 times better than Hive and twice as fast as a leading RDBMS.

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