Organizations are moving more and more of their analytics workloads to the cloud in a bid to reduce operating expenses. One of the vendors trying to capitalize on the trend is Microsoft Corp., which last week rolled out a set of major improvements to its managed Hadoop service in an effort to attract more enterprise customers.

Arguably the most important addition is support for the new LLAP (Live Long And Process), a method of caching data in memory to speed up database analytics in the Apache Hive data warehouse. It enables analysts to run database queries up to 25 times faster than before.

It’s joined by a set of security features that make it possible to regulate who accesses what data, monitor activity and use a company’s internal cryptographic keys for encryption. The features are meant to make Microsoft’s Hadoop service more appealing for organizations that wish to process sensitive information such as customer records and financial transactions.

But while it certainly lends itself to a wide range of use cases, Hadoop can’t support every single data-crunching workload in the enterprise. Applications that use deep learning algorithms to process data, for instance, often need to be run on specialized frameworks like the Deeplearning4j engine from Skymind Inc., which raised $3 million in funding last week to drive adoption. The startup unveiled a commercial version of the technology in conjunction that integrates with leading Hadoop distributions to let customers plug it into their existing analytics infrastructure more easily.

Less than 48 hours after Skymind’s funding round, two other emerging analytics providers called ARCompany and realSociable Inc. merged into new company bearing the name Verse.AI that focuses on marketing optimization. The outfit’s namesake cloud service makes it possible to collect data about their customers’ online activity, identify areas of interest and uncover underlying factors using simple mouse controls. The insights produced as part of the process can then be turned into visual reports to facilitate easier sharing.

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