Happy Friday, everyone! The SDxCentral weekly news roundup is here to deliver you the news bits you might've missed. Get ready for all things software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and more.

If you were hoping for an Altera acquisition by Intel, well, sorry to burst your bubble. Sources close to the situation say Intel has halted discussions with Altera, CNBC reported, leading to a 10 percent tumble of Altera stock. Apparently, the companies couldn't agree on a price.

Rumors fueled the stock price fire for EMC, which was up 44 cents thanks to whisperings that Starboard Value may join in on trying to tell EMC its next steps. Other activist investment firms — Elliott Management, GreenLight Capital, and Third Point — already have stock in EMC.

Amazon Web Services lost $123 million last year, a Citigroup evaluation concluded. It's less a rumor, more of an "educated stab in the dark," as CRN put it — and surprising, considering AWS is supposedly Amazon's most profitable area.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

RedSeal, a network security analytics firm, has raised a $17 million Series C round. The funding comes as RedSeal relaunches with new management and a product focus on cloud and mobile.

Palerra, a cloud security automation company, raised a $17 million Series B round led by August Capital.

Singapore Telecommunications has agreed to pay $810 million for a 98 percent stake in Chicago-based managed security service firm Trustwave, reports Bloomberg.

After hiring an OpenStack board member at the end of March, Akanda secured seed funding this week. The round was led by New Dream Network, with co-investors including The Fabric, Double M Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, Simon Anderson, and Matt Ocko. Details on the total investment amount weren't made available.

NEW RELEASES

Extending its Cloud Network Engine security foundation, Pertino announced zero-trust networking in the WAN to address network security problems associated with distributed workforces in the enterprise.

Plumgrid released version 3.0 of its Open Networking Suite for OpenStack. Red Hat certified, the release includes new features such as Plumgrid Toolbox, a suite of seven monitoring tools, and Dynamic Router VNF, which supports a portfolio of routing protocols including RIP, OSPF, and BFP.

Mavenir Systems’ voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) application is now being used by Vodafone Germany, making it the first commercially available VoLTE service in the European market. It's all part of Vodafone's Telco over Cloud strategy.

Amazon Web Services now offers machine learning as a service. Developers get access to visualization tools and guides to help through the process of constructing machine learning models.

SADDLE UP, PARD'NER

Plexxi struck a deal for big data, combining Plexxi's SDN switching with PSSC Labs’ high-performance compute and Cloudera enterprise. The aim is to offer an integrated product for scale-out applications.

Cumulus Networks is the newest partner in the Puppet Supported program, meaning switches running on Cumulus Linux are now certified to be configured and managed with Puppet Enterprise.

ADVA Optical Networking, Canonical, and Stratus Technologies joined OPNFV this week. The open source project aims to build a reference platform for the NFV framework that was defined by ETSI.

A10 brought on Sanjay Kapoor as vice president of global marketing. His resume includes time at Nominum, Juniper Networks, and Cisco.

Infinera offered to acquire Transmode, a metro packet-optical networking vendor, for roughly $350 million in cash and stock.

Dell added an enhanced edition of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution based on OpenStack. The update provides more flexible IT services for enterprise customer demand, and is co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Dell PowerEdge R630 and R730xd rack servers.