The startup ecosystem continued to set the pace for the analytics industry last week with another series of major milestones that spell new competition for the incumbents reigning over the market today.  GlassBeam Inc. fired the opening shot with the closing of  $2.2 million in Series B funding from VKRM Group and new investor SRI Capital to take on Splunk Inc., a leading provider of log management software for the enterprise.

Founded by Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Famer Kumar Malavalli, the Sunnyvale-based GlassBeam has put together a stack of open-source technologies for finding meaning in the vast amounts of automated transmissions pouring out of the burgeoning Internet of Things. The bundle powers a cloud service called SCALAR packing a homegrown query technology similar to Splunk’s Search Processing Language that exposes structure in disorganized data such as configuration files with the goal of making it easier for analysts to find useful patterns.

As part of the new round, SRI capital managing founder  managing director Sashi Reddi is joining Glassbeam’s board. Like Malavalli, the entrepreneur-turned-investor boasts a formidable track record of exits under his belt that includes the sale of India’s AppLabs, the 2,500-strong software testing giant he established in 2011, to Virginia-based IT juggernaut Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) in 2011.  With the addition of Reddi, the firm’s leadership roster is now almost as impressive as that of Splice Machine Inc., a fellow analytics startup that unveiled an all-star board last week featuring some of the biggest names in the industry.

The initial list of directors includes Roger Bamford, the original creator of Oracle’s Corp.’s  high-availability RAC architecture, along with fellow Oracle alumna and TimesTen, Inc. founder Marie-Anne Neimat, Facebook Inc. analytics head Ken Rudin and last but not least, UC Berkeley’s Michael Franklin. A 30-year veteran of academia, Franklin is the chair of the university’s computer science department and heads its AMPLab, which is best known as the birthplace of the record-breaking Apache Spark processing engine for Hadoop.

The lineup alone provides plenty of validation for Splice Machine’s platform, a transactional  database built on Hadoop described as marrying the cost-efficiency of the batch processing framework with the reliability and simplicity of traditional RDBMS systems. Hewlett-Packard Co. is going for a similar combination of old and new with its latest suite of professional services, which promises take the hassle out of integrating new technologies such as Hadoop into existing backend systems.

The portfolio provides all the usual  discovery, assessment, modernization and transformation services as part of a bundle that also includes a selection of HP’s core analytical products, notably the HAVEn platform and its core components. To appeal to as many organizations as as possible, the company is making the solutions  available under a variety of consumption models ranging from regular on-premise installation to software-as-a-service.

The one-stop-shop approach has always been a popular strategy among vendors to gain more control of their ecosystems, but the sheer breadth of the challenge associated with helping organizations make sense of their unstructured information is driving a shift from the traditional lock-in mentality. The startup crowd is is having no trouble adjusting for this new reality, with the latest example of that coming from data transformation up-and-comer Trifacta Inc., which entered a partnership with Tableau Inc. on Thursday to plug its solution into the the latter’s widely-used visualization platform.

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