Seven years after its creation at Yahoo, Hadoop has proven itself amongst the most efficient solutions for storing vast amounts of unstructured information on the market, now finding its way into enterprise products. Hortonworks Inc., a distributor of the open-source data crunching engine that spun out of the Internet giant,  is turning to some of the industry’s biggest vendors for help with plugging that feature gap.

Hot on the heels of receiving $50 million from Hewlett-Packard Co. as part of a milestone alliance to deliver a joint analytics solution, Hortonworks teamed with another spin-off Pivotal Software, Inc., hatched from EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. last year to accelerate the development of Apache Ambari. The project aims to make it easier for organizations to manage their data processing environments with a set of centralized capabilities platform for provisioning, orchestrating and monitoring large-scale Hadoop clusters. That positions it as a direct competitor to the proprietary Pivotal Command Center, which means the development of the latter product will most likely be halted in the wake of the partnership.

Management has been the name of the game for Hortonworks these past few days, but it was security that dominated the agenda for the rest of the analytics startup scene. ThetaRay Ltd. kicked things off with the announcement of a $10 million round of funding led by General Electric Co. meant to promote its data-driven spin on protecting critical infrastructure such as hospitals and airlines from hackers. The startup employs a collection of homegrown machine learning algorithms to map out the behavior of the host environment and identify anomalies that break the pattern, a unique approach that has earned it the endorsement of several high-profile customers including GE itself.

Continuing the trend, Novetta Solutions LLC, a firm that provides analytical solutions for a broad range of use cases ranging from fraud prevention through network security to identify management, has acquired Global News Intelligence. The deal buys it GNI’s field-hardened sentiment and  influence measurement software, which is relied on by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of State and a multitude of enterpises for monitoring audiences that were inaccessible in the past. No financial details were disclosed since both companies are privately held.

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