The latest technology and life sciences news in WRALTechWire’s Bulldog Blog’s roundup:

  • Alcatel-Lucent’s cloud to deploy Red Hat OpenStack

RALEIGH – Red Hat has landed another big name for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The Raleigh company said telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent will use the Red Hat platform for cloud offering, Cloudband.
Cloudband is a network functions virtualizations technology that consolidates several network equipment types on industry-standard high volume servers, switches, and storage. Red Hat will be part of Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand NFV platform, which offers a new way to design, deploy and manage networking services, supporting a flexible network infrastructure needed to move complex applications and services to the cloud.
Additionally, Red Hat was selected for its ability to enable faster, open innovation through contribution in new upstream OpenStack projects. This collaboration is a product of Alcatel-Lucent’s successful CloudBand Ecosystem Program and Red Hat’s ISV Partner Program in which Alcatel-Lucent holds Premier status.

  • Truphone moves to bigger Durham HQ

DURHAM – Truphone has relocated its U.S. headquarters to bigger space as part of an overall expansion of its U.S. operations.
The Britain-based telecommunications service provider has moved to the Imperial Center at 4309 Emperor Blvd. where it now has 7,000 square feet of office space. The site is the base of operations for executive management of Truphone Americas and also serves as a new regional sales hub for the southeastern U.S. The southeastern location is the fourth regional sales office Truphone has opened in recent months, following New York, Houston and San Francisco.

In all, Truphone anticipates having close to 100 employees in the US by the end of 2014, with an estimated 40 based in Durham. Truphone provides international mobile phone capabilities for large companies with global operations.

  • SAS gains new SAS Visual Analytics customers

CARY – Uniporc Ouest, which weighs and classifies 90 percent of pigs in France, has selected SAS® Visual Analytics to communicate the results of its analysis of 20 million hogs to the entire industry – almost 8,000 breeders, 75 cooperatives and 26 pork-processing facilities.

Uniporc Quest was founded in in 1973 to improve ethical standards in weighing and classifying pork carcasses. Uniporc Ouest sits at the center of transactions between pork producers and breeders. It determines the weight and the muscle ratio of the parts for each hog and communicates the information – collected in complete transparency – to the industry. Breeders are paid based on Uniporc Quests calculations. SAS Visual Analytics allows the organization to generates reports for breeders and the cooperatives they represent, as well as for pork-production facilities. The information is also sent to various national and European agencies, making it an international reference database.

SAS said that banks accounted for 17 percent of the more than 1,400 SAS® Visual Analytics licenses sold in 2013 – more than any other industry. Romania’s most profitable bank, Raiffeisen Bank Romania, uses the software to make better risk decisions.

“SAS Visual Analytics immediately stood out as an easy-to-use choice,” said Beatrice Manole, Credit Portfolio Analysis Department Manager at Raiffeisen Bank Romania. “The software’s real-time risk visualization lets us update our risk reporting in a way that our executives can quickly understand. SAS said that analyzing data with SAS software will help Raiffeisen Bank generate up-to-the-minute risk intelligence for informed, timely decisions.

  • UNC Charlotte adds degree in data science

CHARLOTTE – The College of Computing and Informatics and the Belk College of Business at UNC-Charlotte have partnered to offer a graduate certificate in data science and business analytics.

The certificate is open to all students who hold a B.S. or M.S. in any scientific, engineering or business discipline and are either enrolled in a UNCC graduate program or earned a 3.0 undergraduate GPA. Students will study big data analytics, database systems, network science and decision modeling.

UNCC, a member of the National Consortium for Data Science, said it is building a data science and business analytics Initiative to establish the campus as a hub for innovation in data fields.