The analytics ecosystem saw a welcome change of pace last week when IBM Corp. and Box Inc. turned the limelight to collaboration with the introduction of the first fruits of the strategic alliance they announced earlier this year. The new services employ the former’s analytics technology to make it easier to manage business information stored in the public cloud.  

One of the solutions, a repurposed version of Big Blue’s Datacap file extraction software, allows organizations to scan the content of files and programmatically export the important parts to Box’s platform, while another offers to fetch related details. Workers are able to access the enriched data via a search capability that can be embedded into business applications to improve usability.

The business users that IBM and Box are targeting with the new functionality share the need for data accessibility with the analysts supporting their work, who also received a major boon on that front when Pivotal Inc. open-sourced its HAWQ SQL engine. The technology makes it possible to manipulate unstructured data in Hadoop using traditional structured queries that are considerably easier to write than the native equivalent.

Accompanying HAWQ into the free software club is MADlib, another one of the firm’s homegrown Hadoop addons that in turn aims to simplify machine learning, and the DataFlow information distribution service. The latter project traces its origins not to Pivotal but rather the NSA, which originally released the code under a free license earlier this year.

DataFlow is a new repackaged version from Hortonworks Inc. that comes bundled with support services. Although hardly the most exciting component of an analytics project, a vendor hotline is an indispensable asset for an enterprise trying to operationalize an unfamiliar technology.  

Image via Geralt