Last week saw the emergence of yet more new applications for managing unstructured information after several major analytic players stepped up their competitive efforts. Salesforce.com Inc. led the charge with the release of new connectors that, for the first time, allow the integration of external data sources into its cloud-based business intelligence platform.

That will enable customers to apply the functionality they’ve been using to search and visualize customer records kept on the software-as-a-service giant’s sales management environment for data from their Hadoop clusters, infrastructure monitoring operations and back-end other systems. That should help put Salesforce in a much stronger position against its better-established rivals, but the competition is also upping the ante.

It was Big Blue’s turn to do that last week after pulling the curtains back on the first 20 in a planned series of 100 industry-specific predictive analytic applications designed to solve niche problems that haven’t been receiving as much attention as more common use cases. One new service promises to help oil rig operators predict equipment failures, while another offers automated spending tracking for banks.

The initial batch also includes capabilities for media organizations, retailers and organizations in several other key sectors. The common theme unifying the lineup is tailoring functionality to data, which is the exact opposite of what Google is going for with the acquisition of Pulse.io Inc. announced on the same day.

While IBM is offering organizations customized applications to help monitor patterns in their information, Google will use the startup’s performance analytics technology to deliver customers information about their applications, particularly the mobile kind. The tool allows software engineers to record frozen screens, networking issues and other issues by adding only a single line of code to their apps, which can save lot of person-hours otherwise spent on building that functionality from scratch.

The deal comes amid increased efforts from Google to engage the developer community, which has emerged as important catalyst for change in the enterprise over recent years. The search giant plans to gradually integrate Pulse.io’s capabilities into its product ecosystem, likely in cloud form if its previous monitoring-related acquisitions are anything to go by.

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