Dell cooked up a surprise for the attendees of this week’s O’Reilly Strata Conference. The technology vendor unveiled a new version of its Kitenga Analytics software platform today, and it’s already showing off the new features.  This latest development is just a small part of Dell’s ongoing efforts to retool its core product portfolio for a Services-driven enterprise.

Kitenga Analytics 2.0 introduces several major improvements, including enhanced search and indexing functionality that allows big data practitioners to “better understand and analyze information that combines both unstructured and structured data.” This includes better sentiment analysis algorithms and more integration, in that search and analytics capabilities are more interwoven than before. Dell says that v2.0 also features extended support for the Predictive Modeling Markup Language (PMML), an XML-based syntax that is popular among data scientists.

“Dell is committed to building a complete analytical fabric of all data sources to reduce the cost, complexity and risk that companies face as they wade through Big Data to improve decision making,” said Darin Bartik, the head of product management at Dell’s software group. “With Kitenga Analytics and Toad Business Intelligence Suite [an overlapping Quest solution], Dell Software is creating a world-class solution set to transform how companies search, correlate and use information to solve their business problems and achieve a bigger competitive edge.”

Dell’s end-goal, besides becoming a successful private operation, is to transition from a consumer manufacturer to a full-fledged enterprise vendor. And now that analytics has become one of the hottest trends in IT, Dell simply cannot afford to ignore it.

Earlier this month the company announced a new set of data center solutions for HANA, SAP’s increasingly popular in-memory database suite. These appliances can scale from 1 terabyte to more than 4 terabytes, and are supposedly are based on the same architecture that Dell implemented in its single-server boxes.