There’s a new kid in machine data town, and it just closed another funding round to go after the biggest name on the block. The Santa Clara, CA-based GlassBeam Inc. said this week that the latest $2 million raised from early-stage investment firm VKRM Group and new backer  SRI Capital will be used to accelerate the development of its flagship analytics platform.

Dubbed SCALAR, the cloud-based suite provides capabilities for uncovering useful insights in vast troves of logs and other automated transmissions from connected devices, a broad category that encompasses everything from data center equipment to wearable gadgets. The main component of the offering is a discovery engine that Glassbeam claims makes it possible to search for correlations across files and drill down into specific subsets through a visual interface. It’s complemented by a reporting dashboard allows analysts to share their findings with peers and an ad hoc query tool for making quick lookups.

According to the company, SCALAR is based on a stack of tried-and-tested technologies from the open-source community, including the Solr search engine and distributed Cassandra key-value store. Wrapping the package together is a homegrown technology dubbed Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) that runs directly atop the database and exposes any semblance of structure there may exist in disorganized data to simplify life for business users.

The syntax serves a similar purpose as the Search Processing Language (SPL) that machine data analytics leader Splunk Inc. developed for its platform to make the software more accessible for knowledge workers. The company brought its product to market years before GlassBeam, earning a dominant position and becoming one of the first analytic vendors to go public, but the latter has nonetheless managed to sway several big-name customers to its side. SanDisk Corp. subsidiary and flash storage pioneer Fusion is leveraging SCALAR to track customer usage trends, while systems integration giant Dimension Data plc. has implemented the service to streamline infrastructure operations.

The new financing bumps up Glassbeam’s total funding raised to $8.1 million. The bulk of the company’s capital has come from VKRM, the venture capital firm of co-founder and chairman  Kumar Malavalli, who has been induced into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame for his role in the creation of the now ubiquitous Fibre Channel (FC) storage fiber. He boasts a long track record of leading startups to successfully exits, having helped take FC stalwart Brocade Systems Inc. publicly and, most recently, selling data protection specialist InMage Inc. to Microsoft Corp. in July.

As part of the new round, Malavalli is assuming the role of chief technology officer – more a formality than anything – and, more significantly, SRI Capital managing director Sashi Reddi is joining the board. Like the co-founder, Reddi has a formidable list of startup successes under his belt,  most notably the sale of AppLabs to Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) in 2011.

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