A few vendors announced notable big data developments this week. Hortonworks alone had two.  On Thursday the big data start-up unveiled a new ODBC driver that allows users to integrate their existing BI applications with Hadoop. Hortonworks’ version of the open database connectivity API supports features support for Tableau, PowerPivot and other analytical apps, in addition to Excel and the other names on the standard roster.

And even earlier this week, Hortonworks had an even bigger internal change: Industry veteran Herb Cunitz was appointed as the company’s president. Cuntiz served in senior operational and sales positions at companies like VMware, and now he’s been put in charge of propelling Hortonworks’ growth forward. The startup is competing for shares in a highly crowded marketplace with more than a dozen rivaling Hadoop distributions, and even more concurrent big data service providers.

Cisco also had a major announcement this week. The company reinforced its partnership with SAP by unveiled extended support for the HANA in-memory database. Users running the platform on Cisco’s UCS systems now have access to dedicated HANA administration features bundled up with the SAP IT Process Automation, and the networking giant’s ecosystem is offering more incentives to organizations adopting the technology. These will be available in the form of more value added services and pre-integrated UCS configurations for HANA from partners such as Avnet.

Finally, IBM debuted PureData, the latest addition to its Pure appliance line. Word of the system was leaked earlier this month, and its details turned out to be mostly accurate.

PureData is engineered specifically for data-intensive workloads. It’s available in three different configurations for specific analytical jobs: one is tweaked to handle transactional data, another was built with operational analysis in mind and Pure System for Analytics, the third configuration, is an all-in-one platform for more general use.