Two heads are better than one, the common saying goes, especially when those heads belong to a federation comprised of EMC, Pivotal Software, Inc., VMware, Inc. and RSA Security, Inc.

On theCUBE during the Hadoop Summit 2015, Michael Cucchi, Pivotal’s senior director of outbound product, discussed the company’s recent collaborations.

 “The federation provides the guidance and can do the pre-engineering required to deliver something that’s rapidly providing value to the customer,” he said. “It’s complex to put so many pieces together at an enterprise-class level, and that’s where we’re pioneering together.”

IBM is putting a major stake in the ground in support of Apache Spark, the high-speed analytics and machine-learning engine that is the hottest thing in Big Data right now. IBM said it will embed Spark into all of of its analytics and ecommerce platforms, commit more than 3,500 researchers and developers to work on Spark-related projects and open-source its SystemML machine learning technology for plug a key hole in the Spark technology stack. It will also offer courses to train more than one million data scientists and engineers to use Spark.

Buying is an emotional act. That's why you need machines.

Persado, a machine learning company, claims its algorithmic copywriting produces better direct marketing response rates than ad copy penned by humans. The company was founded on December 12, 2012, a date associated with a trinity of dozens because, "We're all about math," said director of marketing Julia Spano.

 Machines already write prosaic financial news and sports reports, with the help of companies like Automated Insights and Narrative Science. But writing compelling ad copy, arguably a creative endeavor, ought to be difficult for machines.

Chinese-listed shares won't yet join MSCI Inc.'s widely tracked Emerging Markets Index, the latest expression of investor concern over the openness and transparency of Chinese markets despite years of reform.  MSCI said a few important remaining issues related to market accessibility must be resolved, and the shares can be added once that review is complete, even outside the regular schedule of its annual market classification review.

Last week saw the emergence of yet more new applications for managing unstructured information after several major analytic players stepped up their competitive efforts. Salesforce.com Inc. led the charge with the release of new connectors that, for the first time, allow the integration of external data sources into its cloud-based business intelligence platform. 

 That will enable customers to apply the functionality they’ve been using to search and visualize customer records kept on the software-as-a-service giant’s sales management environment for data from their Hadoop clusters, infrastructure monitoring operations and back-end other systems. That should help put Salesforce in a much stronger position against its better-established rivals, but the competition is also upping the ante. 

First, SAP engineers candidly admit that solving the IoT (and related Big Data) issues remains a work in progress. There are products in place -- and customers using those products -- but engineers recognize they need to offer more. The systems in place, though, start with decisions made close to the sensors and edge systems.

 A HANA database that references data sitting in other databases (which can include Hadoop, MongoDB, Oracle, or just about any other commercial database) can use SAP's Smart Data Access -- a data virtualization feature that lets the HANA control structures see data in "virtual data tables" that span multiple databases.

"There is slow, steady adoption," Merv Adrian, a research vice president and analyst at Gartner, told InformationWeek.

Hadoop is transitioning from its early adopter stage to the threshold of mainstream use. But Hadoop's place on the "hype cycle" is pretty much normal. Hadoop is in the "trough of disillusionment," prior to reaching its "plateau of productivity,"Basically, early adoption is giving way to "early mainstream," he said.

Enterprise IT is often a victim of unnecessary complexity and purpose-built infrastructure. Hyperconverged infrastructure can remedy that by offering simplicity, quick installation and high performance, according to several industry experts and practitioners.Hyperconverged infrastructure integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization -- sometimes along with other features like security and WAN optimization -- in a single appliance or software system installed on commodity hardware.