In response to increased pressure from emerging competition in the cloud analytics market, the incumbent vendors are tapping into their large install bases to try and push the envelope with new offerings spanning both on- and off-premise environments. That has been a major theme in the industry for the last few days, with the  EMC federation catapulting into the center of the hybrid discussion following a  number of strategic product announcements hoping to position it as an unlikely front runner in the race to make data insights accessible for the entire enterprise.

On the private cloud front, VMware, the storage vendor’s virtualization subsidiary, on Tuesday teamed up with SAP to make the latest version of the latter’s speedy in-memory analytical database available in customer environments. The new SAP HANA on vSphere can handle up to one terabyte of storage and 32 physical cores (or 64 virtual ones) per host and supports the hypervisor’s full breadth of capabilities, including vMotion, automatic resource allocation and the High-Availability utility. The update provides a significant boost for both firms: it allows VMware to further its edge over rivals Microsoft and Citrix, which have been making gains in the hypervisor market recently, while helping SAP bring HANA a step closer into the enterprise mainstream.

The rest of the EMC federation has not been sitting idly, either. Pivotal, the spinoff led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz, introduced a new software-as-a-service offering for the energy engineering sector called Supplier Exchange that  aims to give decision makers deeper visibility into the value chain. The solution made its debut on the second day of EMC World 2014, within hours of rival Hewlett-Packard revealing plans to invest $1 billion in the development of cloud services over the next two years.

As part of the initiative, the company is rolling out Helion, a portfolio of private and public cloud solutions built on open source technology. Included in the lineup is a free distribution of OpenStack, with a commercial version scheduled to launch in the coming months, and a platform-as-a-service based on the VMware-backer Cloud Foundry project, which was recently transferred to an independent foundation that counts HP among its sponsors.

Not leaving its arch-nemesis’ news unanswered, Dell announced a new version of its Wyse private cloud VDI reference architecture that adds support for  programs that make use of complex 3D graphics. It also comes with the option to deploy Quest’s Foglight application monitoring solution.

The next wave of cloud analytics

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While the big vendors are duking it out over the hearts and minds of CIOs, Splunk is going directly after the business users in the trenches with the latest release of its flagship machine data analytics platform, which is available both on-premise and as a cloud service.

Splunk Enterprise 6.1 introduces the ability to deliver reports and alerts in third party solutions like Salesforce.com and SharePoint, a feature that reflects growing demand for the so-called “embedded intellegence” functionality popularized by Jaspersoft. The firm was acquired by traditional BI giant TIBCO last month for nearly $200 million in a deal that has apparently not gone unnoticed by Splunk.

Besides embeddable reporting, the latest release of the platform also packs a data collection tool for IBM Linux mainframes and expanded visualization capabilities, including a new dashboard editor that allows users to quickly whip up visualizations without doing advanced XML coding, a big plus for the relatively non-technical audience Splunk is targeting. Other enhancements include the ability to click on a panel without leaving the dashboard that contains, a chart overlay feature and pan-and-zoom controls.

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