When an established vendor identifies a gap in its product lineup, acquiring a startup with the necessary technology is often faster and more convenient than trying to build a competing solution from scratch. The latest example of this dynamic came last week when Workday Inc. scooped up Platfora Inc. to obtain its namesake business intelligence software.

The platform harnesses the speedy Apache Spark data processing engine to help analysts quickly find patterns in operational data. Workday didn’t go into much detail about its plans for Platfora, but the little information available indicates that the startup’s technology will be incorporated into its cloud-based financial management service. It’s also likely that the company intends to integrate the software with its flagship human resource management offering, which could also benefit a great deal from new analytics functionality. After all, the employee metrics that organizations store in Workday’s infrastructure probably contain a lot of valuable insight into the factors that influence their workers’ productivity.

The acquisition of Platfora was announced on the same day that Salesforce.com Inc. picked up Coolan Inc.,an infrastructure monitoring startup founded by former Open Compute Project head Amir Michael. The outfit has developed a diagnostics tool that can help administrators identify exactly which components of a server require attention in the event of an outage or a performance issue. Salesforce.com will use the software to streamline the day-to-day maintenance of its cloud infrastructure.

Another vendor that is harnessing analytics to ease business operations is MapR Technologies Inc., which last week introduced a risk management toolkit for its Hadoop distribution. The offering lets financial services providers harness the analytics framework to scan their transactions records for signs of fraud, money laundering and compliance violations. Every organization can tailor the solution’s capabilities based on its specific operational requirements to maximize detection rates.

Image via Geralt