Now that most enterprises have recognized the tremendous potential in the vast amounts of information at their disposal, the technology focus is shifting from the individual tools which make analytics possible at large scale to integrated products that can effectively combine those components into a cohesive platform for driving business insights. This trend has spurred a wave of strategic partnerships in the Big Data market that is continuing to this very day.

The latest industry alliance was announced a few short hours ago by DataStax and Databricks, two emerging startups with plenty in common and a shared vision for open source analytics.

Making stream processing a reality

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Founded in 2010, Datastax offers what it pegs as an enterprise-grade distribution of  Cassandra, a free database for storing large amounts of information on commodity hardware created by a team of Rackspace enginners led by co-founder and CTO Jonathan Ellis. The one-year-old Databricks in turn commercialized Spark, an in-memory data processing framework that is touted as up to 100 times faster than MapReduce, and the complementary Shark SQL query engine for Hadoop. Like Cassandra, the two technologies are available under an Apache license, and just as is the case with Datastax, Databricks’ founders were heavily involved in the initial development.

The firms are now joining forces to integrate their respective projects with the goal of allowing users to rapidly ingest and process data in the same environment without having to shuffle their workloads in and out of disparate tools. The pair claims that using Spark and Shark with Cassandra can “can significantly boost analytics performance in a transactional database and allow companies to act quicker when serving customers’ needs.”

Operationalizing analytics in the cloud

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The partnership between Datastax and Databricks comes on the heels of Google’s acquisition of Stackdriver, a cloud monitoring startup founded by two former VMware employees. Available on Google Compute Engine as well as AWS and Rackspace, the firm’s flagship service displays deployment health statistics and analyzes real-time events to track errors. The search giant didn’t specify if and how the deal will impact deployments on competing cloud platforms nor did it disclose any financial terms, but it’s probably a safe bet to say that the transaction covers the $15 million Stackdriver’s investors put into the startup.

The monitoring capabilities of Stackdriver will give Google a much-needed boost in its battle against Amazon and Microsoft as well as emerging competitors like Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which recently expanded its infrastructure presence in China.  Aliyun , the company’s cloud subsidiary, has formally opened a data center in Beijing that will host 10,000 servers at first and primarily serve customers in northern China. It joins the company’s two existing facilities in Hangzhou and Qingdao.

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