Go Big Data, or be left behind, that was the chorus we heard over the last 10 days. We listened as industry analysts told us how leveraging Big Data and Analytics could help grow the bottom line; we learned how Facebook’s Graph Search might help you get found by recruiters (at the expense of your privacy); we watched Big Data vendors buy what they didn't want to build (or couldn't build fast enough); and we saw a NoSQL vendor with great promise get a humongous investment.

But enough of the summarizing. Without further ado, here’s big news from the world of Big Data that we found notable.

Want To Sell Some Software and Services? Think Human Resources And Staffing

Organizations that use high impact talent analytics outpace the competition by as much as 30 percent says a study conducted by Bersin by Deloitte, a research and consulting firm empowering Human Resource (HR) organizations to drive bottom-line impact.

But, despite that, not enough companies are leveraging data as part of their Human Capital strategies.

Just 14 percent of organizations in our study use advanced or predictive analytics to solve talent challenges and to plan their future workforce initiatives,” says Josh Bersin, a principal at the company.

Karen O’Leonard , a lead analyst at Bersin, reports that the company’s research shows that organizations with sophisticated talent analytics functions see improvements in recruiting, leadership pipelines and talent mobility. She adds that, "building capability in this area has become a critical priority for business and HR leaders; and will likely differentiate high-performing organizations in the future.”

SaaS Incentive & Performance Provider Xactly Deploys MapR’s Hadoop Distro

Variable compensation (like commissions, bonuses, profit sharing …) is a big line item at many companies -- having the right figures and the right formulas is a must, both for the company and for its workers.

But for companies who have to manage billions of transactions per month, with second generation technologies the processes are slow, expensive and hard to scale.

Not so with Hadoop.

Ron Rasmussen, VP of engineering at Xactly Corporation says that with MapR’s Hadoop distro the company is able to run billions of transactions through their systems architecture worldwide 24x7. "The new data paradigm provided by MapR allowed us to perform data science at scale. We can iterate through our new insights algorithms much faster,” he says.

He adds that queries that used to take hours for their data science team now take minutes to process.

With this level of performance we can provide not only industry-leading deep analytics but also the new groundbreaking Xactly Insights™ and benchmarking solutions so a customer can see how it performs compared to others in similar industries.” 

Work4 is Ready to Help Recruiters Separate the Chaff from the Grain

There’s a high probability that the best job candidate for any particular job has a profile on Facebook. But finding that person amongst 1.2 billion profiles isn’t easy.

Work4 makes it easier.

The company launched Graph Search Recruiter, a service which leverages Facebook’s Graph Search (algorithms built by Data Scientists) and Facebook’s member database to locate likely candidates and contact them. Read our article on Work4 here.

And in case you haven’t heard, Facebook changed your privacy settings this week. Users can no longer hide from appearing in Graph Search results. This makes Work4 extremely powerful.

Pivotal Goes Shopping

When it comes to buying mobile technologies, some purchase US$ 310,000 cell phones like the Vertu Cobra, others, like EMC spinoff Pivotal use their cash to acquire companies. Late last week, Pivotal bought Xtreme Labs, a mobile development and strategy shop that has built apps for Groupon, Microsoft and IAC.

Why? Because having a mobile play is a must, and Pivotal needs Xtreme’s talent to build Enterprise-grade mobile and Cloud solutions for its Big Data play.

IBM Buys The Now Factory

Communications service providers, aka CSPs, (though you and I know them as mobile service providers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and the like) are serious about squeezing insights out of their Big Data. And IBM doesn’t want its customers to have an Information problem they can’t help solve.

That’s why IBM has moved to acquire The Now Factory, a provider of analytics software that helps CSPs deliver better customer experiences and drive new revenue opportunities.

The Now Factory fits nicely into IBM’s MobileFirst Analytics portfolio and should help the company to grow its Big Data business, which is expected to reach US$ 20 billion in revenue by 2015.

MongoDB Gets HuMONGOus Bucks

For now, MongoDB is the sweetheart of the NoSQL world; but it isn’t actively looking to woo business away from other NoSQL database vendors. Instead it’s after Oracle and IBM, the titans of the client server-era whose products and services weren’t built before this era of Mobile, Social, Big Data and Cloud.

For those unfamiliar with MongoDB, it’s a document database built to handle the kind of voluminous, rich and unstructured information that’s being created today -- the kind contained in e-mails, videos, tweets and the like, that doesn’t fit neatly into columns the way transactional data does.

MongoDB is also OpenSource, which means that developers can look at the database’s source code. This is quickly becoming a “must have” among this generation of developers -- so much so, that recruiters are using “Open Source” as a selling point.

But even if you put MongoDB’s “state of the art” and cool factors aside, it’s also highly desirable because it’s flexible, making applications easier to build in less time (faster to market and potentially much greater ROI). Add to that that it’s cheaper to use because it runs on commodity servers ...

Given that, it seems like MongoDB might just be the hottest tech company of the future. While that’s too big a prediction for us to make, some pretty impressive investors are making a statement by reaching into their wallets.

Late last week MongoDB announced that it has raised a new round of funding of US$ 150 million from the likes of Salesforce.com, EMC Ventures, T. Rowe Price and Altimeter. Its previous investors include Intel, Red Hat, New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital.

Teradata Aster’s New Discovery Platform Makes More Users Smarter

Earlier this week Teradata Aster announced the biggest architectural change to its Teradata Aster Platform to date. It has added a new SQL-based graph-analysis engine to go along with the platform's existing SQL query and SQL-based MapReduce capabilities.

This change allows companies to learn a whole lot more from their data and could, as a result, make Teradata Aster the vendor to beat in the Big Data analytics space. Read more about it here.