Datawatch and Quant5, two Massachusetts firms working to capitalize on the business world’s growing appetite for analytics, are combining their resources in a joint effort to level the playing field against their rivals.

For a publicly-traded vendor that counts 496 of the Fortune 500 as customers, Datawatch has kept a low-profile. The nearly thirty-year-old company operates out of Chelmsford, MA and develops software for handling the different types of information that flow in and out of organizations today, including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured files. Its solutions can be split between two categories: enterprise content management, or ECM, and data visualization.

Based in nearby Cambridge, Quant5 has only been around for three years but has also proven a force to be reckoned with. The startup offers a cloud-based platform designed to help marketers gain a better understanding of their audiences and what can be done to improve engagement. The service packs customer segmentation and predictive analytics functionality not unlike those offered by Medio Systems, the Seattle-based digital advertising specialist that was acquired by Nokia earlier this month.

Joining a list of more than 100 other partners, Quant5 is teaming with Datawatch to integrate the capabilities of its offering into the latter’s data visualization workbench. The software includes a modeling tool that enables it to blend information from multiple sources, whether real-time or historical, and then turn that combined whole into charts using a complementary built-in designer.

Through the integration with Quant5’s service, Datawatch Desktop now allows brands to go a step further and anticipate the likelihood of a specific lead turning into a paying customer, as well as the best way to achieve that goal, the companies said. For a more granular view of the bottom line, users can break down sales performance by specific products and categories.

The partnership throws down the gauntlet to data visualization stalwart Tableau, which at present only provides a basic set of analytical capabilities in its software. Admittedly, the company’s main focus is enabling  clients to communicate information more effectively and not on helping them process it, but that functionality gap is evidently nonetheless viewed by some competitors as a vulnerability.

Datawatch is not the first vendor to mesh data discovery with visualization. Migration specialist Syncsort is going for a similar combination with Project SILQ, a first-of-its-kind technology currently under development aimed at making it easier for organizations to move existing processes into Hadoop. It “scans your legacy complex SQL queries, which can be a hundred lines or more, it visualizes them choreographically and then it gives you recommendations and assists in recreating those workloads most efficiently within Hadoop,” Syncsort CEO Lonne Jaffe detailed in his most recent appearance on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

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