The perfect storm of Big Data, cloud computing and mobility is disrupting traditional business intelligence, loosening the incumbent vendors’ iron grip on the enterprise and creating an opportunity for startups to fill the market gaps left in its wake. DataRPM is trying to do just that with a natural language solution that promises to put the power of analytics in the hands of everyday knowledge workers.

Available both on-premise and in the cloud, the firm’s platform pulls information from disparate sources and stores it in a distributed computational search index that works more like Google than a data warehouse, enabling users to gain access to business insights without writing any SQL queries. DataRPM announced this week that it has raised $5.1 million in Series A funding from InterWest Partners and CIT GAP Funds to accelerate the adoption of the product, which is already used by over a dozen customers in the financial services, telecommunications and media industries.

SAP’s response to its emerging competition is HANA, a speedy in-memory database that serves as the foundation for its fast-growing portfolio of cloud solutions. The most recent addition to the line-up is Business One 9.0, a new version of the firm’s ERP solution for SMBs that provides the ability process different types of information – structured as well as structured – in a single environment. For customers, that reduces licensing costs and eliminates the need to move data around.

SAP launched this latest version on the same day it announced a partnership with professional services giant Accenture to create a new business unit that will focus exclusively on developing industry-specific solutions on top of HANA. Also this week, the BI giant entered into an alliance with Huawei to “explore opportunities” in the BYOD and smart city domains. As part of the collaboration, the Chinese telecom equipment maker is rolling out a purpose-built HANA appliance that it says offers five times less latency and 15 times more bandwidth than a “leading alternative solution”.

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