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Today Oracle announced its intent to acquire e-commerce company ATG. In addition to typical online retail features, ATG offers analytics, click-to-call and call tracking features that will compliment Oracle's own offerings. Forrester's Suresh Vittal and Altimeter's R "Ray" Wang agree that the move targets IBM.

IBM continued its acquisition feast today by gobbling up Clarity Systems, a financial governance software company. It also completed its acquisition of risk and compliance management software company OpenPages. Last week IBM acquired governance software company PSS Systems, and last month it acquired big data company Netezza.

IBM says "These strategic moves further accelerate IBM's business analytics efforts, one of the fastest growing segments in the overall IT industry and a key growth play for IBM." And the company's CFO Mark Loughridge projects business analytics will generate $16 billion in revenue for the company by 2015. But what is business analytics, and how does it differ from business intelligence?

SAP employee Timo Elliott has unveiled a prototype for an augmented reality business intelligence iPhone app. He emphasizes that it's a prototype, not a supported product. It's not available for download yet, but Elliott gives us a look at what an augmented enterprise could look like.

Elliot released some proof-of-concept mock-ups on his blog earlier this year (see our coverage), but the project is now in development at SAP in the BusinessObjects Innovation Center, which Elliot says is based on Google Labs.

Tibco has launched a business intelligence tool designed for the small business market that it is making available for free over the next year.

TibcoSilver Spotfire is part of Tibco's effort to appeal to a community that would not normally have access to its robust business intelligence technology. These are people who understand social technologies and may find the service appealing for what it can do that spreadsheets do not.

JackBe is releasing technology to allow enterprises to to create their own internal "app stores" on June 30. Complementing JackBe's existing line of mashup and app making tools, the JackBe App Store will enable users to share the AJAX apps they've created with other uses within the enterprise. The apps are portable and can run as standalone apps, on dashboards, in Sharepoint, on mobile devices, and pipe data into Excel.

The very notion of data silos seems to be turning upside down and sideways and shaken all around. A whole new generation of applications are infiltrating the enterprise and bringing out a new dimension of intelligence not previously explored.

One of the great challenges of starting up a new business is being good at everything the business demands: Marketing, investor relations, inside sales, development, operations, IT, project management, the list goes on. Most startups don't get the luxury of being able to grow their staff quickly and must carefully choose who comes on-board. The natural result of this is that hard decisions are made every day on what part of the business requires attention.

One vital part that can easily be overlooked in the startup environment is business intelligence. The problem usually isn't with acquiring critical data, but rather in making sense of trends and other signals buried in that data. That is where Bob Moore and Jake Stein of RJMetrics have been focusing for the past year, developing effective and affordable solutions for their internet startup customers, helping them see trends, create timely reports, and interact more effectively with their investors and employees.

Few companies have captured the world's attention online in recent years as much as Twitter has. Rapid, structured, public communication between groups of people is not only a personal paradigm changer for many who have seriously explored the service - it's also an incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation.

First the Web, then email, then instant messaging and SMS all helped speed up the world we live in. Twitter made that rapid communication public and easier than ever for machines to mine for connections. Just as Facebook will never be Twitter because of the lack of clear access it offers outsiders to social data, so too does Twitter have its own limitations. A service called Status.net will launch in May that could overcome some of Twitter's limitations and make a significant impact on the world we work in.