Vendors are investing heavily to address the growing demand for analytics functionality in the enterprise. As part of this push, Salesforce.com Inc. last week acquired a startup called BeyondCore Inc. that specializes in extracting meaning from large databases with upwards of millions of records.

Its namesake business intelligence platform works by mapping out the mathematical relationships between the different snippets to identify commonalities that might be of interest. According to BeyondCore’s website, the process can be carried out in as little as a few minutes and doesn’t require any special data processing skills. Salesforce.com Inc. will bake the technology into its Analytics Cloud to help users answer complex business questions more easily, a goal that a startup called Heap Inc. is pursuing as well.

The outfit raised $11 million last week to fund the creation of new features for its behavioral analytics service, which can help organizations gain a better understanding of how customers use their services. Like BeyondCore, Heap is geared towards business workers who don’t necessary have experience with analyzing raw data. The platform lets every user customize its algorithms to look for metrics that are relevant to their specific focus area, whether that happens to be sales, marketing or engineering.

Against the backdrop of Heap’s funding round, the Linux Foundation launched a new project called Platform for Network Data Analytics (PNDA) that aims to help IT professionals make better use of their network logs. The software harnesses Apache Spark to provide real-time insights into data center traffic and help identify anomalies faster. According to its backers, this includes most of everything mundane performance issues to suspicious requests that may indicate the presence of malware. And if that’s not enough, the open-source nature of the technology makes it possible to extend its core feature set with custom diagnostics functionality.

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