This past week in big data features several updates, in addition to the regular stream of industry commentary SiliconANGLE is producing. The news includes the convergence of several players in this market, a new event that further strengthens Cloudera’s position in the community, and a notable case study from ClickFox.

First up is freshly announced partnership between Hadoop distributor MapR and BI platform provider Informatica. The two firms will integrate their offerings to give joint users access  to an expanded number of advantages and functionality, achieved via a new agreement that will undoubtedly help better position both MapR and Informatica positions.

Connotate has also forged a new means of progressing in the extremely competitive big data space, via the acquisition of Fetch. The companies offer technology that helps marketers aggregate data from the web which they can draw insight from, and this deal will be used to strengthen Connotate’s portfolio – on top of easing the competition just a bit.

Cloudera is busy expanding its own growth as well, and is doing so via several means. In addition to offering up proprietary code that enhancements the core Hadoop functionality the developer has been improving its relations with the developer ecosystem, most recently with a new conference. HBaseCon will be hosted by Cloudera in May, and will be focused entirely on the database and how it fits in with Apache big data project as a whole.

Moving on to ClickFox, the consumer analytics software maker can list Sprint as one of its customers. And satisfied customer at that, considering new numbers that indicate the carrier has managed to boost consumer care thanks to ClickFox’s platform and the circulation of the extracted data on an organization-wide scale.