The analytics ecosystem is constantly churning out new products and services designed to help companies make better use of their data. Last week saw Amazon Inc. join the fray by launching Kinesis Analytics, a managed stream processing engine for extracting insights from fast-moving information such as sensory transmissions and social media interactions.

The service sets itself apart by providing the ability to manipulate incoming records using the same SQL syntax that business workers employ to interact with traditional relational databases. According to Amazon, queries can be made to run in a continuous loop so that new information is processed almost as soon as it’s ingested. Kinesis Analytics makes it possible to control the rate of repetition and other parameters through a graphical panel that the cloud giant claims doesn’t take any special skills to use.

The day after Amazon Inc. rolled out the service, Oracle Corp. launched a B2B data exchange where organizations can buy information to fuel their marketing analytics efforts. The catalog provides access to over 400 million audience records that the vendor obtained through a combination of acquisitions and partnerships with over half a dozen leading market intelligence providers. The cache also contains detailed profiles about over a million businesses that provide insight into potential sales opportunities, competitor activity and industry trends.

While Oracle and Amazon are fighting over conventional analytics use cases, Intel Corp. is going after the AI-powered applications of tomorrow. As part of this effort, the company last week paid $350 million to acquire Nervana Systems Inc., a startup that has developed an ASIC specifically optimized for running deep learning software. The chip is supposedly capable of carrying out certain tasks up to ten times faster than competitors while providing a memory access speed of eight terabits per second. Intel hopes that the acquisition will level the playing field against Nvidia Corp., whose GPUs are usually the first choice for companies developing artificial intelligence workloads.

Image via Geralt