Last week saw the analytics movement grow even more closely entwined with the cloud thanks to new updates that promise to help organizations take advantage of the economies offered by the as-a-service model to accommodate their growing information troves. VMware Inc. found itself in the center of it all after word leaked of internal plans to join the fray with a managed database.

The upcoming vCloud Air SQL service will reportedly offer a pre-configured installation of Microsoft’s relational store designed to power relatively low-priority use cases such as testing new applications that would require more time and resources to support behind the firewall. VMware hopes taking care of the implementation will make it easier for customers to realize the benefits of the hybrid cloud model for their analytic workloads, a goal shared with many others in the industry.

Among them is a little-known startup called Maana Inc., which raised  $14.2 million in funding from Generic Electric Co., Intel Capital and a number of other big-name investors last week to help make data stored in off-premise services such as vCloud Air SQL and other dispersed sources more accessible. Its namesake search engine accomplishes that using a homegrown concoction of algorithms that goes beyond merely retrieving information.

Maana integrates the data from an organization’s various systems to provide a complete view of business metrics, sparing analysts from having to do all digging on their own and making it easier to spot operational inefficiencies with the same stroke. While something of a bonus as far as the startup is concerned, the latter has emerged as a massive opportunity in and of itself for one of one of its fellow data management providers.

Delphix Inc. has emerged as a force to be recognized with in that segment on the back of a unique virtualization technology that provides centralized control over data copies to help prevent duplicate files from taking up space after they’re no longer needed. The company followed up Maana’s funding with the acquisition of an outfit calling itself Axis Technology, LLC that has developed encryption capabilities for ensuring different teams can only access the information they absolutely need.
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