Big data and big data analytics are moving on from being the latest “buzz words” as products begin to emerge that start to address the problems of handling vast amounts of unstructured data.

Yahoo! is the latest company to make an announcement with Yahoo! Genome building upon the years of experience the internet services company has in handling huge data sets from its user base which the company say now exceeds half a billion people. According to the platform website Genome, to be available around July 2012, can combine information from its own database and existing customer relationship management applications to provide more detailed information regarding customers and their activities.

Compuware have also announced an update to its dynaTrace Enterprise product, as part of its APM Platform Spring Release 2012, which will support big data environments emphasising cloud performance management and automatic baselining of systems. As enterprise begins to take advantage of cloud technology and its ability to dynamically scale its architecture web based applications that handle big data require radically new tools.

Data integration specialist Informatica recently announced version 9.5 of its data integration platform with more emphasis on maximising return on big data, that is “the value of data divided by its cost” – a view also recently held by IBM at its RoI: Return On Information event and when it comes to big data analytics the big blue already has an array of tools on offer including InfoSphere Streams for analysing continuous streams of data and InfoSphere BigInsights, a Apache Hadoop based tool, for analysing both structured and unstructured information.