The analytics ecosystem shifted its attention to the broadband industry last week after Verizon Communications Inc. unveiled a new managed platform aimed at enabling organizations to process the vast quantities of data generated by connected devices more easily. Making up for the carrier’s late entry into the fray is an impressive feature set that turns its more established rival’s own playbook against it.

General Electric Co. is exploiting its dominant market share in the industrial sector to offer customers a cloud-based analytics environment that interoperates with their machinery to an extent a third party provider simply can’t match. Verizon’s new platform attempts to exploit its comparable lead in telecommunications to the same effect, enabling organizations to manage their machine-generated data in the same place as the infrastructure through which that data flows.

The appeal of the integration extends beyond the limited industrial use cases on which GE is focusing its efforts to every connected device that falls within the carrier’s coverage area, a major strategic edge. But the colormate is hardly the only obstacle standing in the way of Verizon’s analytics plans. It may soon find an even more formidable rival in IBM Corp. which acquired The Weather Company last week to bolster its own initiative to operationalize machine-generated data.

The $2 billion deal will provide the technology giant with valuable meteorological information that could help make its analytics services much more attractive in sectors such as agriculture and retail where weather trends have a tangible impact on the bottom line. Unlocking access to the raw sensory measurements is only the first step towards gaining actionable insights that can help dealing with the elements more effectively, however.

The individual metrics first have to be integrated into a usable whole that the business analysts in charge of extracting those insights can work with, which is where Alteryx Inc. comes into the picture. The company raised $85 million in funding against the backdrop of IBM’s announcement to fuel the addition of more features to its popular data blending platform and step up marketing efforts in order to attract to more customers.

Image via Geralt