This week had a few notable updates, including one from Rackspace.  The cloud hosting provider introduced something called OpenStack Fundamentals, a certification course that’s based on material developed for internal use. The material has been around for a year or so, so Rackspace had a lot of time to polish it up before offering it to the community.

OpenStack Fundamentals is available for $2500 per seat, and organizations have the option of setting up an on-premise classroom for up to 18 engineers for a fee. Rackspace is justifying the premium price tag with the very valid claim that enterprises are looking to hire IT personnel with cloud expertise more than ever.

The second update comes from the VMworld Europe conference that was held this week in Spain. One of the clients at the event was a service provider named Colt, which shared its VCE and VMware View case studies on the showroom floor.  The firm is leveraging Vblocks, Cisco UCS servers and management software from Atlantis to support 20,000 virtual desktops; it also operates the single largest vCloud 5.1 deployment in Europe.

In turn, Alteryx released version 8.0 of its analytics software. The main addition is  Analytics Gallery, a hosted app marketplace that clients can use to distribute apps and info within their organization. Gallery features 30 different analytical apps and 5 native data visualization tools that allow decision makers to gain faster access to insight.

In the personal cloud space, Springpad rolled out a few new features to its web and Android apps.  The productivity tool now has ‘Board’, a scrapbook interface that allows you to organize notes pictures via simple drag-n-drop. Springpad has become even more user friendly with the ability to reshuffle notebooks at any given time.