Hadoop distributor MapR has raised a new round of funding and may be preparing for an IPO next year, Salesforce acquires analytics startup BeyondCore, Coursera releases a new data analytics course together with PwC, and Apple CEO Tim Cook provided some illumination on how his company regards artificial intelligence (AI). We've got all the highlights in this Big Data Roundup for the week ending Aug. 21, 2016. Let's start with the news from Hadoop distributor MapR. The company recently announced that it has raised a round of equity financing worth 50 million, and provided a few select details about its financial performance. MapR is still a privately held company, so it can choose what to disclose and what not to disclose.

If you're a smart technology provider, you give your customers a vast selection of tools to get their jobs done. Forward-thinking vendors do this through partnerships and integrations with best-in-class providers -- and, often, through acquisition of best-in-class providers themselves. As a case in point, consider Salesforce's acquisition of San Mateo, Calif.-based analytics provider BeyondCore this week, which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff confirmed via a tweet. The terms of the sale were not disclosed. Several forces have come together to radically impact the power of analytics in the enterprise, namely big data and consumerized IT.

Pursuing its stated goal to make software smarter, Salesforce has made yet another acquisition, this time agreeing to buy BeyondCore, a San Mateo, Calif.-based data-analytics company. BeyondCore disclosed the sale in a blog post and Salesforce founder the CEO Marc Benioff confirmed it in a tweet, saying that BeyondCore will "enhance the AI capabilities of Analytics Cloud." Terms weren't disclosed, but BeyondCore has raised 9 million since its founding in 2004, according to CrunchBase. BeyondCore was already integrated into Salesforce as part of its upcoming version 7 release, BeyondCore said its post. The acquisition is Saleforce's seventh this year, marking a major increase in velocity -- it bought only 13 other companies between 2012 and 2015, per CrunchBase.