Oracle said it is buying Endeca Technologies, a move that will bolster its capabilities for searching and analyzing unstructured information. Endeca is a privately held unstructured data management and Web commerce software company. 

BARC recently announced the results of their BI Survey 10 - The Customer Verdict. They received nearly 3000 responses for this survey so it's quite a comprehensive look at the state of business intelligence.

One of the most interesting findings in their survey was that the most frequent problem encountered by BI teams is company politics. Last year data quality was the most frequently cited problem, but internal politics has now worked it's way to the top of the list.

There's long been talk about information democratization, but evidently the reality is that everyone is not on the same page when it comes to receiving maximum benefit from an enterprise's data assets. To me, this means that as BI professionals, we need to create better alignment with the executive team as we move business intelligence forward so that political issues can be mitigated and the true benefits of BI can be attained.

For more information about the survey, visit http://www.bi-survey.com/