-- Name: Dylan Smith, co-founder and CFO

Informatica has strengthened its hand in the burgeoning market for Hadoop, the open-source programming framework for large-scale data processing, unveiling a new data parser on Wednesday that can transform piles of unstructured information into a more structured form for use in running Hadoop jobs.

Data-integration vendor Informatica and a customer are embroiled in a legal dispute over US$6.3 million in license fees that Informatica says it is owed due to noncompliance.

The options for cloud and SaaS (software as a service) data integration grew larger on Wednesday with the announcement of Talend Cloud, a new product from open-source vendor Talend.

Informatica is joining the growing ranks of vendors moving to support Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale or "big data" processing, the company announced Monday.

Microsoft next month will release a set of new components to its Azure AppFabric suite of middleware cloud services that should make it easier for administrators to create and manage cloud applications.

Red Hat will launch a preview of a new commercial enterprise Java data caching technology, based on its experimental Infinispan data grid software, the company announced Tuesday.

NetSuite and Informatica announced a partnership on Tuesday that seeks to exploit the concept of "two-tier ERP" (enterprise resource planning) deployments.