This week’s full of big data news, in part thanks to O’Reilly’s Strata Conference (check SiliconAngle regularly for live coverage and analysis).  We covered Pentaho’s agreement with DataStax to couple its BI platform & interface with the latter’s data engine, with the vision of making it easier for data scientists to work in what is by default an extremely complex environment.  Tableau and Attivio made a very similar announcement this week as well.

Tableau offers solutions that help users better manage their big data – visualization technologies, dashboards and other methods. This will now be available to customers that use Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine and vice versa, fusing the complementing advantages of the two platforms.

“As we set our sights on huge growth in 2012, the insight Attivio delivers will help bring our solutions to more users across the enterprise – especially business units looking for ways to harness and understand unstructured content,” said Suzanne Hoffman, Director of Channel at Tableau Software. “In turn, we think Tableau will help the traditional business intelligence community literally visualize the power of unified information access in ways never before possible.”

Last week Tableau had another notable update, when it hired Brooke Seawel as a director and the head of its audit committee. He held executive positions at NetDynamics and Synopsys, both of which are software companies, and has more than enough experience to contribute to Tableau’s long-term goals.

Attivio in turn has been expanding in a different direction; Europe. Earlier this month the analytics firm announced that it has landed a fat contract with Europol, the law enforcement agency tasked with monitoring and identifying suspicious activity that may be related to serious crimes such as terrorism.

The company recently formed a partnership with CSC, which will offer services to Attivio customers on the continent.