The growing influence of data on decision-making in the enterprise is turning analytics into a key focus area even for vendors that have historically made most of their revenue elsewhere. Last week, Dell Technologies Inc. joined the fray by introducing a new number-crunching platform that promises to help organizations make better use of internal information.

Dubbed Analytic Insights Module, the offering combines appliances from the company’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure family with EMC Isilon storage arrays optimized for unstructured data. Running on top is an analytics toolkit that enables business intelligence professionals to import information into the platform, catalog it and run various calculations through a specialized graphical interface. Organizations can optionally integrate the platform with third party software from Dell’s extensive partner ecosystem if the built-in functionality doesn’t cut it.

The company’s growing efforts to accommodate the analytics requirements of its customers comes as Amazon Inc. pursues a similar initiative over in the public cloud. As part of this push, the provider last week integrated its Aurora relational store with the AWS Lambda event processing  service. Organizations with strict compliance requirements can now configure the latter tool to generate an audit log whenever an analyst carries out a sensitive operation in their database instances. And it’s also useful for manage complicated aspects of the ETL (extract, transform, load) lifecycle that Aurora isn’t equipped to handle.

A day after Amazon’s update, Syncsort Inc. launched a new integration of its own help customers better process data from their mainframes, which typically power mission-critical workloads such as financial applications. Users of the company’s Ironstream software can now stream their big iron logs to Splunk’s  IT Service Intelligence tool in real-time to identify performance and system health issues. The offering uses machine learning to analyze operational information for problem indicators that administrators have traditionally struggled to uncover.

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