UPDATED 08:15 EDT / APRIL 04 2016

NEWS

What you missed in Big Data: Enabling faster analytics

Although the venture capital community is much less generous with its cash than it was a year ago, promising analytics startups are still more than capable of raising funding. Last week saw the investor appeal of data crunching software reaffirmed once again after MapD Technologies Inc. announced that it’s secured a $10 million investment from Nvidia Inc., Alphabet’s Inc.’s private equity arm and several other big-name backers.

The capital will help finance the development of new features for its namesake relational store, which is designed to run not on the x86 Intel Xeon chips included in most servers but rather GPUs. As a result, the platform is able to carry out data visualization orders of magnitude faster than traditional business intelligence software and even outperform the newer in-memory variety. Verizon Communications Inc., one of the several corporate heavyweights that MapD lists among its customers, claims to have witnessed query speeds improve by as much as 50 times during an internal test.

The startup’s funding announcement came against the backdrop of another analytics provider called Invoca Inc. raising $30 million through a financing round of its own. The Santa Barbara-based firm has developed a toolkit that makes it possible to identify the types of customers who are most likely to ring up an organization’s contact center, understand why they’re calling and put that information to use. Marketers can either use the platform’s built-in algorithms to process the data or export it to one of the numerous third party business intelligence systems that are supported out of the box.

Microsoft Corp. likewise lets organizations move information from their Office 365 deployments to external analytics software through Graph, a cloud-based API that received a major update at its Build summit last week. An application can now pull employee documents based on their relevance to a certain topic and check a worker’s status information, which facilitates the creation of automatic conference scheduling functionality.

Image via Wikimedia

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