Attendees of Splunk Inc.’s sixth annual conference in Las Vegas were greeted by a raft of updates this morning that open a new chapter in the vendor’s efforts to expand its business beyond merely providing a platform for processing machine-generated data to addressing the specific use cases that this information supports.

One particular focus point in Splunk Enterprise 6.3, the new iteration of its flagship analytics software that is launching at the event, is the connected universe. And more specifically, the vast amounts of data coming off the new categories of devices that are finding their way into the corporate network.

The release sports a programming interface for stream processing that the company claims can be used to pull millions of logs into its platform every second and a complementary geospatial visualization function that makes it possible to map out the transmissions to their areas of origin. The inherently distributed nature of the new connected devices being deployed at the edge of the network makes that essential for many key use cases.

To help users keep up with the massive streams of information generated by those applications, Splunk revamped the core data ingestion and search capabilities of its platform with the same opportunity to provide what is described as a 50 percent performance improvement over the previous release. But its focus on speeding analytics doesn’t stop at that.

The vendor also wants to help organizations optimize the Hadoop clusters in which they process historical business data and all the other infrastructure powering their key processes with a new monitoring extension introduced in conjunction. The tool exploits of the speed enhancements in Splunk Enterprise 6.3 to “index terabytes of real-time and historical events metrics” pertaining to data center operations, according to the company.

Its other extension, Splunk Enterprise Security, which also received an update at the event, works the same way. Except instead of looking for performance issues and other operational problems, the software uses the machine learning technology that the company obtained through its acquisition of Caspida, Inc. earlier this year to surface signs of hacking.

Splunk has expanded that functionality with productivity features that enable security professionals to arrange events in a timeline to try and trace the source of a breach. Customers and partners that have more specialized requirements can complement that functionality with their own custom additions if need be.

Image via Geralt