Alpine Data Labs announced support for the open source Spark technology for in-memory analysis on top of Hadoop. Spark developer and support provider Databricks has certified Alpine's implementation of the technology for machine learning and analytics.

 HP Vertica is in partnership with multiple Hadoop vendors (most recently MapR), but with its recent Vertica 7 release it introduced Flex Zone, which sounds like a lightweight alternative to Hadoop. Flex Zone is built on commodity hardware. Its nodes can store structured or semi-structured data. It supports schema-on-read analysis, meaning you just load data without having to create a schema in advance or use ETL to load. FlexZone is deployed and managed with the same tools used for Vertica, and it's queried with SQL (or in-database R or Java-based algorithms). Flex Zone does not support unstructured data (like images or audio files) or MapReduce processing as Hadoop does. But you won't have to learn Pig or MapReduce, and it's said to be about in line with Hadoop storage costs.
 

MetaScale, the big data consulting and services firm, spun out of Sears, highlighted a new managed-services program through which it can take over the management and administration of Hadoop clusters and other big data infrastructure that's already in use. It does so using remote-monitoring capabilities. For companies that have yet to deploy big data infrastructure, MetaScale offers Hadoop and NoSQL appliances that are prewired for its remote-management services. The idea is here is to get around the big data talent shortage and speed deployments by tapping MetaScale's experience in big data deployments and its economies of scale in managing infrastructure.
 

New Relic, a Web- and mobile-application monitoring company, this week announced new Insight analytics capabilities within its platform. The idea is to go beyond monitoring app performance and to start collecting and analyzing application data, such as customer names, ages, subscription levels, product selections, and other attributes that might be used for up-selling, cross-selling, and customer segmentation. Think Splunk-meets-application-monitoring, but in this case the audience is developers who can exploit the tools to build more intelligence into their Web and mobile apps.
 

Paxata won a Best Analytics Startup award at Strata for its Adaptive Data Preparation platform, which runs on Hadoop or in the cloud. Geared to business analysts, the platform supports merging, cleaning, enriching, and otherwise shaping raw data sets into information that's ready for business intelligence and analytics. The data-management tools bridge the gap between information-management professionals and data scientists -- the people who do all the heavy-duty coding and data-management work -- and the business users who demand novel combinations of data and new reports. The analysts in between have lacked tools for working efficiently with data, according to Paxata.