Marketing made a comeback into the analytics discussion last week after Radius Intelligence Inc. raised a hefty $50 million from investors to support the development of its business-to-business targeting service. The funding caps off a record year that saw its revenue quadruple thanks to an influx of new clients drawn to the prospect of being able to better identify future opportunities.

Radius facilitates that with a segmentation engine that not only provides insight into different subsets of an organization’s existing customer base but also outside groups that might be interested in its offerings. The company claims that its automated approach has enabled some users to increase their sales severalfold through targeted expansion into new segments.

That kind of gain was unheard of until a few years ago, and still is for the majority of organizations that don’t yet use marketing automation services such as Radius in their targeting efforts. But that could soon change thanks to a startup called Autopilot Inc. that bagged $7 million in a funding round of its own last week from customer relationship managment powerhouse Salesforce.com Inc. and a number of other backers to drive the adoption of such solutions.

Its online training center features courses and best practices on how to engage customers across the multitude of online channels that make up the modern marketing ecosystem along with case studies that encompass multiple sectors to provide relevant references for participants. But all of that still only fills a small part of the analytics knowledge gap in the traditional enterprise.

The lack of skills to harness new sources of data becomes most pronounced several layers down the stack in the Hadoop clusters powering many of the large-scale analytics projects being launched nowadays, which pose major operational challenges for CIOs. One of the most difficult is physically moving information into the engine for processing, which is DataTorrent Inc. promises to simplify with the new migration technology it announced on the day of Autopilot’s funding.

The aptly-named dIngest tool provides a high-level interface for managing the flow of data across the various protocols and standards used to handle application communications in the corporate network. Administrators can use the software to centrally pull information from different systems into their Hadoop clusters and perform bulk actions on the incoming files such as encryption and compression, according to Datatorrent.

Photo via Geralt