Despite early setbacks, OpenStack persevered to make steady progress toward its mission to provide an alternative to Amazon for the enterprise. At the conclusion of the third day of a successful OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, theCUBE cohosts Stu Miniman and John Furrier discussed OpenStack’s past, present and future. Although it experienced a rocky past, the future looks bright.

“OpenStack has crossed over the chasm to an environment where you’ve got REAL buildout, real architecting, and real engineering up and down the stack, form hardware operations to software engineering to solutions architects,” said Miniman. “It’s in the adolescent stage, but it’s accelerating. And it’s got some good investors.”

The data spotlight turned back to sentiment analysis last week after IBM Corp. pulled the curtains back on a new cloud-based service that can infer attitude from natural language communications. It’s the latest fruit of its billion-dollar investment in bringing the cognitive computing capabilities of Watson into the workplace.

The aptly-named Watson Tone Analyzer is also one of the most ambitious yet, not only due to the sheer complexity of emulating such an inherently human trait but also the tremendous potential of the service in improving how organizations engage their audiences. What has historically required the careful attention of a salesperson can now be accomplished automatically for a fraction of the cost.

MindStream Analytics ranked 428 on this year's MSPmentor 501.

MSPmentor 501 honoree MindStream Analytics has announced a partnership with Lavastorm Analytics to provide self-service and analytics software to its enterprise customers. Here are the details.

MSPmentor 501 honoree MindStream Analytics has announced plans to bring business intelligence (BI) and analytics technology to its enterprise customers. 

The Boston-based managed service provider (MSP) this week partnered with Lavastorm Analytics to provide self-service and analytics software to its customers.

So what does the partnership mean for both companies and their respective customers?

Majesco, a provider of insurance software, consulting and services, has launched Majesco Business Analytics, which the company says was built on the foundation of the Cover-All BI. Majesco previously acquired Cover-All, creator of the business intelligence application.

Majesco Business Analytics is the first step in the integration of the Cover-All and Majesco portfolios of applications, Majesco said. Majesco Business Analytics will be offered as a pre-built to the Majesco P&C Suite, the individual components, including policy, rating, underwriting, billing, claims and reinsurance, and as a standalone application.

“The capabilities to generate actionable business insights for improving business performance are becoming critical for insurers to differentiate by meeting increasing customer expectations and sighting opportunities in today’s dynamic insurance market,”

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.

Formed less than six months ago, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which controls Pivotal Software, Inc.’s Cloud Foundry, has made much progress in a short amount of time.

“We’re waking up in a world where we care about two things: multivendor and multicloud,” said Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji, who filled in theCUBE cohost John Furrier on Cloud Foundry Foundation’s background during OpenStack Summit 2015. “We should be very concerned about single-vendor open source. A year ago IBM announced that Cloud Foundry was going to be part of Bluemix and moved to create the foundation along with Pivotal. Nine months ago when HP made the same announcement around HP Helion, that’s when the ball really STARTED rolling.”

What does it take to be a truly digital business? What does digital business mean to your customers and your company? Answering these questions might prove key to competing in this new online world.

 On July 14th, IBM Big Data hosted an online discussion through the CrowdChat website on the topic of “steps along the way in the digital business journey.” The guest list included IBM’s James Kobielus, Big Data evangelist; Jonathan Sloan, senior certified executive software IT specialist and team lead for data analytics on the IBM System z platform; and Mark Simmonds, enterprise architect and senior product marketing manager, IBM Software Group. A number of other voices from the tech community also attended.

The burgeoning analytics ecosystem witnessed another round of consolidation last week after Microsoft Corp. acquired a startup called VoloMetrix Inc. for its productivity tracking software. The deal aims to bolster the workforce monitoring capabilities that it’s been developing internally for Office 365 and intends to launch within the next few weeks.

VoloMetrix brings pre-implemented performance dashboards to the table that provide detailed breakdowns of how an employee allocates their work hours, including time spent collaborating with peers and, for salespeople, customer interactions. That data is overlaid against personal productivity goals each user can set individually to illuminate areas for improvement, such as meeting durations or the amount of attention given to high-value accounts.