The competitive roster of the analytics world was reshuffled once again last week after Splunk Inc.  splashed $190 million on a relatively low-key machine learning specialist called Caspida Inc. in its largest acquisition to date. The deal will help make its log management platform better-equipped to catch hackers on the corporate network, already one of the most popular use cases among its customers.

Yet until now, those customers had to develop their own models to extract anomalous patterns from data aggregated in Splunk Enterprise. The purchase of Caspida will help address that with the integration of the firm’s pre-built capabilities for identifying vulnerabilities and malicious activity into the platform, which will significantly reduce the amount of manual work involved in the detection process and thereby to a that much wide range of organizations.

The deal is part of a broader push at Splunk to move up the value chain beyond merely offering an environment for data analysts to process their machine-generated logs to directly providing the means of accomplishing of that. The initiative reflects a similar effort from Confluent Inc. to find new ways of monetizing its own analytics software, the popular open-source Kafka messaging service used to move information to and from Hadoop clusters.

The startup raised $24 million in funding against the backdrop of Splunk’s acquisition to expand its  commercial distribution of the technology with features for analyzing data in real-time and storing the results. Confluent hopes that the simplicity of having everything in an integrated bundle will win over customers from the niche components that currently needed to be used in conjunction with Kafka to perform stream processing.

Microsoft is going for a similar integrated value proposition with its cloud-based Azure Machine Learning toolkit, which also made headlines last week after the addition of a data catalog meant to make it easier for large organizations to manage their information sources. As the name implies, the service acts as a centralized index of the various systems on which an enterprise draws for its analytics projects that users can leverage to quickly find remote data assets.

Photo via justgrimes