IBM is pushing the envelope of business analytics with new solutions for processing and operationalizing Big Data. Most notable among the latest additions to the company’s portfolio is SmartCloud Analytics Predictive Insights, a cognitive computing service that takes advantage of the technology behind Watson to let customers rapidly sift through large volumes of machine data. Predictive Insights was announced during IBM’s recently concluded Information on Demand Forum alongside a number of other offerings, including a cloud-based version of the BLU Acceleration in-memory processing engine.

The two services are joined by InfoSphere Data Explorer, a search tool that visualizes data streams, and a monitoring solution called InfoSphere Data Privacy for Hadoop. The software can be used to “anonymize” data stored in HDFS as well as relational and nonrelational systems to prevent hackers from accessing sensitive information.

While IBM is working to make Big Data more actionable, Aerospike is tapping into the power of the cloud to deliver insights in real time. The vendor teamed up with web hosting Internap to let enterprises analyze fast-changing workloads without having to spend an arm and a leg on software licenses, infrastructure and maintenance.

Internap will offer Aerospace’s flash-optimized in-memory database on top of its bare-metal cloud service, which provides increased performance by delivering compute resources directly instead of going through a hypervisor. Srini Srinivasan, the founder of Aerospike. said that the integrated offering can “operate at speed and scale twice as cost effectively as they could with virtualized public cloud offerings.”

Upping the ante on cloud analytics, RightScale introduced a cost management solution for multi-provider environments. The service lets users drill down into spending by cloud, application, department, and team, and can combine historical data with growth projections to predict future expenditures.