After two years of hard work, August Capital finally sees the fruits of AppFormix, Inc.’s labor.

AppFormix, a provider of infrastructure performance optimization for Cloud-based datacenters, aims to bridge the gap between applications and infrastructure. The company recently announced that it would integrate with Mirantis OpenStack to bring improved analytics and control to IT administrators. AppFormix CEO Sumeet Singh has a long history in the tech industry, having served previous stints with Microsoft Azure and Cisco Systems, Inc., as well as founding other companies.

“We adopted it aggressively,” said Gerasimatos when asked how FICO made the transition to OpenStack. FICO’s timeframe from zero to a fully functioning solution was just 12 months.

“What we needed to do was to become a little more agile as we were going global, so that pushed us to go toward the more OpenStack design,” he said. Gerasimatos credits FICO’s close relationship with Red Hat, Inc. as being mutually beneficial.

 ‘Don’t be afraid; embrace it!’

 Gerasimatos sees the benefits of OpenStack as the low point of entry, scalability, software-defined networking and storage without having to pay the penalties. He lists problems encountered during the transition, including how the FICO operations team struggled to get their heads around the distributed scale-out design, as well as difficulties finding qualified engineers with open-source experience.

Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis Inc. has just grabbed a second $100 million funding round led by Intel Capital, with participation from existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures and WestSummit Capital. Mirantis said it plans to work with Intel to make the open-source framework much simpler to deploy and manage, with the goal of rapidly boosting its enterprise adoption.

Mirantis co-founder and president Alex Freedland said that under the arrangement, Intel has agreed to make its engineering and lab resources available to the company so it can make OpenStack easier to administer. According to him, though many organizations are using OpenStack in production enviroments today, doing so requires they have a large team of IT experts on hand to deploy and maintain it.

In this special guest feature, Eric Haller ofExperian’s global DataLabs offers his perspectives on the growing demand for data scientists. Eric is the executive vice-president of Experian’s global DataLabs. He leads data labs in the US, UK & Brazil that support research & development initiatives across the Experian enterprise. Prior to Experian DataLabs, Eric had responsibility for the management and growth of online credit profiles as well as strategic markets such as internet delivery, government, capital markets and retail banking for Consumer Information Services.

Every day, the amount of information available to solve some of society’s most vexing problems grows exponentially. By 2020, the amount of data in the digital universe will grow ten-fold.

But for all its potential, data alone won’t change the way we distribute innovations, administer healthcare, conduct business or operate in the global economy. Data in its raw form is nothing but untapped potential.

IBM and the US Energy Department are working toward creating the next-generation of high-performance computing systems, which they call "data-centric supercomputing." This has business and national security implementations.

All it took was President Barack Obama's signature to activate the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) late last month. The move frames a continuing partnership between IBM and the US Department of Energy to develop and deploy the latest generation of supercomputers.

But rather than throwing more processing power at big computational problems, IBM is taking a broader, systemic view on how data flows through a system and where computation can be placed to process data as it moves.

Financial services, telecom/media and manufacturing lead vertical markets in Big Data adoption according to the Wikibon Big Data Analytics Survey, writes Dr. Ralph Finos in his latest analysis. The survey data breaks down overall results into 12 vertical industries, each with its own data analysis needs. The report recognizes three stages of Big Data adoption: evaluation, proof of concept, and deployment of at least one Big Data application.

The second tier of maturity includes government, retail/wholesale, healthcare, IT technology and Business Services, Finos writes.These sectors are conducting point projects that use large data sets, but the results are less mission-critical than those in first-tier industries.

Standardizing the interface between “the world of tools and the infrastructure to build apps, and the systems that take apps and run them,” was the topic of conversation with Craig McLuckie, senior product manager at Google, who spoke to John Furrier and Jeff Frick on @theCUBE, during OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015.

“Hybrid needs to be first and foremost about being able to use a common set of technologies,” he said. In a theme that ran throughout the interview, McLuckie emphasized that it is about “looking to create common abstraction.”

Asked if the hybrid Cloud truly exists, McLuckie told theCUBE’s John Furrier, “It exists, but not the way people think of it existing.”

ExtraHop, a leader in real-time wire data analytics for IT intelligence and business operations, today released the findings of a report conducted by industry research firm TechValidate, revealing how organizations are building out their IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) practices. The study, which polled nearly 100 CTOs and other IT decision makers at Fortune-1000 organizations, shows organizations are thinking more strategically about big data analysis for IT (ITOA), with 65 percent already combining data sources or planning to do so within the next year.

According to Gartner, “[d]emand for ITOA is intensifying among large and