The analytics ecosystem returned to its roots last week with a raft of updates from the old guard of business intelligence. It was SAP SE that appropriately fired the opening shot by pulling back the curtains on a cloud-based data processing platform promising to augment its other services with deep operational insights.

The built-in modelling capabilities enable users to perform the high-level budgeting and planning activities that constitute the bread and butter of business intelligence mining as well as more ambitious undertakings like scouring social media for market trends. SAP hopes that the combined feature set will make the service a sort of one-stop environment for performing an organization’s most important analytic chores.

That’s the same role IBM Corp. aims to fill with the cloud-based incarnation of Watson, which received a landmark update the day after the announcement of its German rival’s new platform that introduced a series of pre-configured models for visualizing patterns in various datasets. Most of the nine so-called Storybooks focus on industry-specific use cases that have been mostly underserved so far.

One promises to make it easier for retailers to gauge the impact of bad weather on their sales, while another offers to provide an automated assessments of an organization’s investment strategy. But despite their wildly varying functions, all of the models share a focus on helping business users uncover insights faster, a goal that GoodData Corp. is pursuing in parallel with its own platform.

To that end, the business intelligence giant rolled out new management functionality on Thursday that allow enterprises to create custom feeds from their data warehouses tailored to specific roles. As a result, GoodData users will no longer have to waste precious time manually digging up the information required for their work and thus potentially free up hours  every day. 

Image via Geralt