With the analytics revolution now in full swing, companies everywhere are coming under increased pressure to monetize their data, perhaps none more than Twitter. The social networking giant announced this week that it has picked up longtime partner Gnip, one of only four third party firms with full access to its so-called firehose, which pumps out about 500 million tweets each and every single day.

Twitter said that the acquisition will allow it to “go much faster and deeper” in monetizing its vast troves of historical and real-time data, which is actively used by a broad spectrum of organizations ranging from marketing agencies seeking to better engage specific audiences to traders hoping for an edge on the stock exchange. By buying Gnip’s technology and infrastructure, the firm is cutting out the middle-man and getting much closer to all those customers – but also putting tension on its relations with other analytical partners.

Meanwhile in the data center, Nutanix, a maker of “private cloud-in-a-box” appliances that combine compute, storage and networking in a single chassis, unveiled a new version of its proprietary operating system that introduces a monitoring module called Cluster Health. The add-on taps into raw infrastructure data to give admins real-time visibility into their environments, according to the firm, as well as the ability to diagnose and resolve potential issues ahead of time via a visual interface.

Lastly, MongoDB revealed on Wednesday that Silver Spring, a provider of networking solutions for smart grids, is leveraging its namesake database in a new analytics architecture designed to integrate streaming data into business processes. The SilverLink Sensor Network, as the technology is called, takes advantage of MongoDB for processing large volumes of fast changing machine-generated information.

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