There were several highlights from the analytics space this week, including a couple of major partnerships.

Syncsort, a maker of data integration software, signed up for the Cloudera Connect Partner Program to get its DMExpress platform certified for CDH4 and Cloudera Enterprise.  DMExpress has been available for HortonWorks users  since June, so this is a big win for both Syncsort – which increased the availability of its platform – and Cloudera, which can now compete better in the market.

The news was followed by a big reveal from another big data firm, Pentaho, who entered into a lucrative partnership with networking giant Cisco.

The two companies will ship an appliance that runs Pentaho’s data aggregation and visualization software on Cisco UCS hardware. The platform will be open, so that customers will be able to integrate the system into their existing environment, in addition to being accessible, thanks the fact it’s pre-configured.

Cloudant also had an update this week. The database provider’s software is now being leveraged for GAIN Fitness, a popular mobile app that originally used PostgreSQL. The developer made the switch because more scalability was required to support a rapidly growing user base of over 100,000 health buffs.

An up-and-coming firm called Space-Time Analytics had some big news as well. It raised $14 million in funding for its geolocation-based analytics service that’s used by utilities infrastructures to monitor large numbers of end points.   Space-Time offers added value by visualizing all that data, reducing the time it takes to get the message through to the end user. It’s a prime and rather literal example of what’s taking place in the emerging data infrastructure, where game-changing technology is making business more productive beyond the IT department.