Red Hat mulls BI strategy

Red Hat is looking to fill gaps in its increasingly burgeoning portfolio of software goodies by declaring it may soon get into the BI game, reports The Register.

The company's JBoss CTO Mark Little says plans were afoot to develop software for that market.

He did not discuss, however, whether Red Hat's move into the business intelligence area would involve home-grown technology, or come from a possible acquisition over the next year. “We have plans to do something in the BI space,” he said.

NHS Wakefield District has carried out one of its biggest IT investments to date, a move that will provide valuable insight into how the primary care trust (PCT) is performing in relation to the health needs of its local population, says HES Magazine.

The PCT has procured a business intelligence solution from COA Solutions comprising of IBM, Cognos and COA Solution's own software systems in a bid to track health trends in an area where the health of the population is known to be worse than the England average.

Using the information, the organisation will now be able to more effectively fulfil regulatory requirements and improve the services it delivers to 321 000 residents.

Business intelligence vendor SAS has reported positive results and managed to achieve growth of 7% in the UK software market despite the downturn, according to Computing.co.uk.

The company posted a 2.2% revenue gain over 2008 at $2.31 billion in 2009, with financial services spend accounting for 42% of the total. Other verticals where growth rates were high for the company included government, healthcare, insurance and retail.

According to the firm, SAS reinvested 23% of its 2009 revenue in research and development and ended the year with no redundancies resulting from wider economic pressure.