Unified data analytics provider Databricks announced a $400 million investment in a Series F round, bringing the company’s value to $6.2 billion. 

“Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open source and the shift to the cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand. As a result, Databricks is among the fastest growing enterprise software cloud companies on record,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.

Databricks plans to invest 100 million Euros in its recently announced European Development Center in Amsterdam over the next three years, build dedicated engineering teams to advance popular open-source technologies and to fuel global growth. 

OpenJS Foundation announces new professional certification program
The OpenJS Foundation announced the new OpenJS Node.js Application Developer (JSNAD) and OpenJS Node.js Services Developer (JSNSD) certification programs. 

The new certifications are aimed at Node.js developer and are designed to build competence while using the Node.js framework.  The programs were developed in partnership with NearForm and NodeSource. 

“The availability of certification is a big milestone for the Node.js project. We now have formal materials and exams available which will support the next wave of adoption of node.js in the enterprise,” said Cian Ó Maidín, NearForm CEO & founder.The details on the certifications are available here.

Parasoft partners with Curiosity Software for software testing
Parasoft partnered up with Curiosity Software Ireland, a specialist provider in model-based test automation, to combine products for better software delivery. 

The partnership will leverage Curiosity’s flowcharts, which enable the auto-generation of tests and data to cover every possible scenario, according to the companies. Testers can then leverage these models in the Parasoft ecosystem. 

“By combining forces with Curiosity, we are providing another way for testers to keep pace with development by continuing to make it easier to shift-left testing to the moment design and development begins,” said Mark Lambert, VP of products at Parasoft. “By making it as easy as possible, integrating Curiosity’s model-based approach into the breadth of the Parasoft Continuous Quality tool suite, testers can easily generate realistic test cases and virtual services that enable the organization to deliver on the promises of Agile and DevOps.”

The full details on the partnership are available here.

Melissa announces active data quality tools for developers and DBAs in Microsoft environment
Melissa, a provider of global  identity verification and data quality solutions, announced the release of new data quality tools for developers and DBAs in the Microsoft environment to prevent bad data costs of 10-25%.

“With address and data verification APIs that are intuitive and functional, organizations can instead face their address problems head-on. Valuable customer data is kept consistently clean and standardized, helping firms conquer their pain-points and increase profitability,” said Bud Walker, the vice president of enterprise sales and strategy, Melissa. 

Melissa tools integrate closely with the range of Microsoft technologies, including restful APIs and components for .NET, SQL Server Integration Services, Dynamics CRM, and Excel.

The full details are available in this post.