The enterprise analytics crowd kicked off the new year with a string of major developments aimed at addressing the explosion in use cases for unstructured data over the past 12 months. FoundationDB Inc. set the train in motion on Monday after revealing plans to expand its namesake key-value store with a new component for exposing information as objects.

The upcoming addition augments the extensible architecture of the database, which makes it possible to layer a wide range of custom capabilities over the core engine ranging from individual automation functions to entire query languages. But the main selling point of FoundationDB is ultra-reliable transaction processing of the caliber typically only found in less capable relational databases, functionality that the upgrade will help bring to more applications.

GraphLab Inc. raised $18.5 million in additional funding and re-branded itself Dato a few short days after FoundationDB spilled the beans on its roadmap.  Dato said it’s also  expanding its charter to include machine learning. The move comes three months after the team revealed a commercial implementation of the open-source framework from which it drew its original name that extends the range of supported data types beyond graphs to other kinds of information.

The software, dubbed GraphLab Create, bundles that functionality with capabilities for building machine learning services into a development toolkit for data scientists. The suite provides everything needed to build a predictive analytics application, according to the newly-funded startup, including functionality for aggregating and organizing sample data, implementing models and rolling out the finished solution to users.

The platform competes with 0xdata Inc.’s H20 platform, a rival machine learning toolkit that has the benefit of having been around much longer, an edge the new funding is meant to help erode. A similar goal stands behind Alert Logic Inc.’s acquisition of Achilles Guard Inc. last week, which is meant to level the playing field against the cloud security provider’s better-established competitors.

Commonly known as Critical Watch, Achilles Guard has developed a platform that uses machine learning to match to the most appropriate countermeasure in the organization’s arsenal. The software is specifically designed to work with integrated enterprise security suites such as the kind Alert Logic is currently building out. That makes it a particularly good fit for the firm’s growth plans.

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