ML/AI

Lots of news this week, to compensate for last week’s lame haul.

In an excellent post on O’Reilly Radar, Ben Lorica surveys the landscape of workbooks, notebooks and workflow tools, which he categorizes by user persona.

On GitHub, a collection of links for streaming analytics (h/t O’Reilly Data).

In a “twofer”, VentureBeat plugs its GrowthBeat Summit and a report on Marketing Automation tools in the same post.  You can pay $299 for the report, or just look at the bubble chart below.

Acquisitions

IoT player PTC says it will acquire ColdLight, merge Neuron with Thingworx.  Valuation was $105 million, roughly 13X Coldlight’s annualized revenue.

MasterCard announces it will acquire APT, a cloud-based test-and-learn provider, for $600 million.

Adatao

Startup Adatao releases its Data Intelligence Platform, a user-friendly interface to Spark, Presto, Impala, Flink and other Big data back ends.  More coverage of the release here, here, here and here.

In Wired, Cade Metz profiles Adatao founder Chris Nguyen.

Alteryx

In TechRepublic, Mary Shacklett reveals Alteryx’ “secret” for improving usability.

Analytics in the Cloud

Dave Wang of Databricks goes out on a limb, lists five reasons analytics in the cloud will be big in 2015.

Apache Flink

Ian Pointer invents a bogus conflict between Flink and Spark, throws FUD at Spark in the process.   Pointer’s celebration of Flink’s “pure” stream processing and Tez integration reads like a Hortonworks plant.

More on Flink here.  Color me skeptical.  I’ll buy into Flink when it does something.

Apache Hadoop

Zubin Dowlaty of Mu Sigma unpacks the time machine, takes us back to 2011.

Apache Phoenix

Cloudera announces that Phoenix, a project for SQL on Hbase, has joined Cloudera Labs.

Apache Spark

On this podcast, Matei Zaharia discusses Spark.

In Datanami, Alex Woodie dives into Databricks’ plans to speed up Spark.

AtScale

OLAP on Hadoop startup AtScale emerges from stealth, introduces product, hires Alpine exec.

BlueData

CRN names virtualization startup BlueData to its Big Data 100.

ClearStory Data

BI and visualization startup ClearStory Data announces “further” integration of its Spark-based tooling with Cloudera CDH, which will surprise those who thought ClearStory had already integrated with CDH.

It’s not clear what “further” integration means.  Integration is like pregnancy; you can’t be a little bit pregnant, and you can’t integrate just a little.  ClearStory’s datasheet says it can use Hadoop as a data source without specifying a distribution, which most customers would take to mean it works with CDH.

I suspect that this announcement simply means that ClearStory has certified its software on CDH.  Now if they would just get around to certifying on Spark.

Cloudera

VentureBeat reports that Cloudera is worth $5 billion, roughly the same amount of value that Teradata has lost.

Microsoft

Jordan Novet publishes a roundup of announcements at Ignite 2015.

Pivotal

Pivotal’s PR agency worked overtime this week thanks to EMC World; stories here, here and here.

The Powerpoint slide for the Pivotal Big Data Suite now has 15 buttons, including Pivotal HD, which is really Hortonworks HDP.  Stories here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

By open-sourcing Greenplum and outsourcing Hadoop, Pivotal seems to be trying to move up the stack.  That’s a reasonable strategy — it’s doubtful there is a need for another Hadoop distribution, and Pivotal was a marginal player.  Greenplum was roadkill in the data warehouse appliance wars, permanently stuck in the Visionary box in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, so open-sourcing makes sense.  It’s like donating your old Volvo to charity to take the tax deduction.

But it’s not clear what it is they’re trying to move up to; when the top of your stack is Hawq and a query optimizer, you’re in deep trouble.  EMC passed on buying Alpine when it bought Greenplum, which tells me that EMC execs do not “get” business analytics.

Here’s another triumph of packaging: Studebakers badged as Packards.

Predixion Software

After much hoopla about its “D” round, Predixion announces that it has raised $4 million, which is just sad.

RapidMiner

RapidMiner announces a new dot release.

SAP

In ITBusinessEdge, Mike Vizard describes some planned enhancements to SAP’s offerings for predictive analytics.

Scala

Dharmendra Kapadia is very excited about Scala.

Zoomdata

Cool visualization vendor Zoomdata announces rapid bookings growth, new executive hires.