Splunk and Tableau are among the hottest sellers in the area of ​​big data, machine-to-machine communication and data visualization. The two companies have now announced a partnership. Splunk, the specialist operational intelligence, and Tableau Software, the specialist visualization solutions and data analysis, have announced a strategic alliance with the aim of releasing machine data to professional users.

This joint technology investment should help leverage the latest ODBC driver (Open DataBase Connectivity) to access Splunk native mode Splunk Enterprise data from the latest version of the Tableau software.

The rapid spread of IT and the greater use of mobile devices, cloud, and other new technology, there is a large amount of big data and machine data that enterprises can potentially analyze to derive business critical information and insights. This combination will provide superior, in-depth analysis of real time data that enterprises can use to further their business goals much more quickly, easily, and accurately.

“Tableau is the most widely recognized provider of visual analytics software,” said Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, Splunk. “Our alliance with Tableau extends the value that Splunk software unlocks in machine data. Using Tableau to visualize structured data with machine data in Splunk will enable people to gain new business insights.”

This integration is interesting in more ways than one. First, Splunk technology really pushed the field of operational intelligence and allowed professionals to enjoy incredible productivity gains and get more information from their IT environments. Then, machine data collected by Splunk have great potential value. These are data from servers that logs applications, information from the API, message queues, those relating to events or data changes from sensors installed on the remote devices. With this integration, users have access to this new category of data in Tableau by simple drag and drop.

Users can now leverage Tableau to visualize machine data from Splunk Enterprise, enabling new business insights from a rapidly growing class of data. These capabilities are complementary to the real-time and historical visualizations and analytics across large data sets in Splunk Enterprise. The integration also enables users to correlate, analyze and visualize machine data with other structured data for advanced business analytics.

“Splunk leads the market in enabling organizations to collect, index and make searchable machine data from apps, servers, networks, websites and devices in real time,” said Chris Stolte, chief development officer and co-founder, Tableau Software. “Our integration lets organizations use our visual analytics software on their machine data in Splunk software. Whether it’s to find quick insights or explore machine data, it accelerates new insights for anyone using Tableau and Splunk.”

A Splunk administrator can create a saved search that retrieves real-time data in the logs of web servers.  With a few clicks, an analyst can connect to the research reported, go see sales data in Excel and compare two sets of data simultaneously to look for correlations and refine its understanding.

Splunk recently released a new plug-in for Eclipse and Splunk SDK for Python for building applications that use and extend Splunk. The Splunk plug-in for Eclipse contains a project template for building with the new SDK for Java applications. By using the plug-in, developers can create modular inputs that extend Splunk and allow it to talk to other internal systems or public APIs, like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Splunk SDK for Python introduces a new library for creating custom search commands including dynamic queries from public APIs (such as Social or Open Government APIs), or for addressing domain specific concerns like retrieving data from an internal system or applying custom business logic on top of Splunk data.