“We’re building a platform … so that people can consume on demand, as they need it, what they’re looking for,” said Chris Wright, chief technologist for Red Hat, Inc. Wright, along with Dave Ward, CTO of engineering and chief architect at Cisco Systems, Inc., joined theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015 discuss the current Red Hat/Cisco partnership that aims to bring open source to the next level, making it a carrier-grade technology.

According to Ward, a co-development model is now essential for innovation. “Open source has become the industry de-facto standard,” he said. “If you want to un-cluster a situation, do it together, do it in the open and make it better top to bottom.”

Just two months after launching its Apache Spark-powered cloud platform, Databricks has announced a major update with a range of new feautures designed to help users facilitate Spark app development and control access to date.

Databricks’ platform is a cloud-based Big Data processing engine based on Spark, offering a multi-user graphical interace and standard libraries like Spark SQL and MLlib. The new update offers features including access control, support for the R statistical programming language, notebook versioning and support for multiple versions of Spark. Called Databricks 2.0, the company says the new version does away with the need to contend with the operational complexities that are inevitable when using tools and systems associated with traditional data solutions.

AOL, Inc. has acquired mobile advertising and data company Millennial Media, Inc. for $238 million.

The all-cash deal sees AOL offering Millennial stockholders $1.75 per share of common stock.

Founded in 2006, Millennial bills itself as “the leading independent mobile marketplace” and offers advertising solutions that are claimed to make mobile simple for the world’s top brands, app developers, and mobile web publishers.

The company combines a traditional advertising platform with data and technology assets that are said to enable its advertising clients to connect with their target audiences at scale while also driving monetization for its publisher and developer partners.

The meteoric increase in the amounts of data entering the corporate network is raising the need for organizations to modernize not only the systems in which that information is stored but also the supporting infrastructure below. That’s what Cisco Systems Inc. set out to help facilitate through a collaboration with Basho Technologies Inc. announced last week.

The partnership has produced a framework that enables the latter’s database to run on Mesos, an open-source management technology that can consolidate disparate servers, storage systems and networking equipment into a unified pool of resources applications are able to draw upon as needed. That approach lets platforms like Basho’s scale to meet data growth much more easily than traditional operating models.

Program to consist of four MOOC courses, plus a capstone project with Yahoo!

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has announced that it will launch a specialization in Business Analytics on Coursera.

The new specialization has been designed to help students understand how to use data to make business decisions in a variety of functional areas. It will include MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in the following areas:

Customer Analytics, which covers customer behavior topics such as descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.

Operations Analytics, which will go into how data can be used to more effectively match supply with demand.

Under The Radar

Startups developing technology for collecting, analyzing and managing big data make up a disproportionate number of the companies on this year's CRN list of emerging vendors. That's not so surprising when you consider that big data is one of the hottest segments of the IT industry right now. Just take a look at recent venture funding announcements from such companies as Interana ($20 million in January), Looker ($30 million in March), Snowflake Computing ($45 million in June) and Domo (an astounding $200 million in April).

Here's a selection of 10 big data/business analytics startups from this year's CRN Emerging Vendors roundup. They may be developing groundbreaking technology, upsetting the business intelligence status quo or making a splash in the channel.

Microsoft Corp. has clearly perfected the art of playing catch-up with Amazon Inc. in the public cloud over the last few years. Less than 24 hours after its arch-nemesis debuted two new services for developers, the software powerhouse is firing back with the announcement of a fully managed discovery engine aimed at another key constituency in the enterprise: business analysts.

The aptly-named Azure Data Catalog does exactly what the name suggests, serving as an index of the various systems and services from which an organization draws its information. Each source needs to be added individually, but the process is largely automated thanks to an integration wizard that handles the extraction of the necessary details for the filing process.

IBM launches new IoT developer community

Big Blue announced the launch of the IBM developerWorks Recipes, a community designed to help developers — from novice to experienced — quickly and easily connect IoT devices to the Cloud. Developers will also learn how to use data coming from the connected devices.

Developers who join the community will be able to tap into IBM’s  Bluemix, allowing them to implement step-by-step tutorials for embedding advanced analytics and machine learning into IoT devices and applications.

Some of the things developers can do include understanding vehicle performance by analyzing data from its On-Board Diagnostic system;