The analytics movement crossed another milestone in its evolution last week with the release of a new iteration of Apache Spark that brings large-scale stream processing closer to the reach of the traditional enterprise. That’s thanks to several key reliability improvements and an automated input control feature that together significantly reduce the amount of manual work involved in operating the engine.

The latter addition enables administrators to throttle the amount of data that enters their implementations, which prevents sudden volume spikes from overburdening the underlying hardware. That risk is made all the more tangible by the new performance optimizations introduced in conjunction, which allow Spark to process considerably more information at any given second.

But as efficiently as the engine enables organizations to analyze their data, the resulting insights are only as useful as the decision-maker can make them. That’s what CartoDB Inc. hopes to help improve with its data visualization service, which attracted $23 million in funding last week from a group of big-name backers including Salesforce.com Inc.’s investment arm.

The capital will go towards growing the adoption of the software, which allows organizations to turn their location data into interactive maps that can be visually explored for specific insights. The startup claims that its approach makes it much easier for business leaders without data science know-how to find the information they’re looking for, the same goal Demandbase Inc. is targeting with its latest acquisition.

The marketing analytics provider announced last week that it’s buying a little-known startup called WhoToo Inc. with a data aggregation service that allows marketers to centrally access audience metrics from different public and private sources. Demandbase will combine that information with its tracing technology to let customers map out key details such as buying habits to specific leads.

Image via Geralt