theCUBE Live At Hadoop Summit 2014

The two biggest names in analytics both made their presence felt this week in a last-moment burst of activity before the industry turns its attention to Strata + Hadoop World 2014. Splunk set the tone after pulling the curtains back on a brand new version of its flagship log management platform that makes the power of machine-generated data more accessible than ever.

Unveiled on occasion of the company’s annual user conference in Las Vegas, Splunk Enterprise 6.2 compresses the complicated and time-consuming process of preparing information for analysis into a few straightforward steps in a pre-configured wizard. Once everything has been properly ingested, users can started digging into their data using the new dashboarding capabilities introduced with the release, which are meant to save everyday business analysts the hassle of familiarizing themselves with the Splunk Processing Language.

The upgrade also replicates that simplicity to the back-end with a centralized console for monitoring distributed deployments and clustering improvements designed to help administrators become more efficient in their work. Tableau Software Inc. is aiming for the same goal with Drive, a newly released collection of best practices on delivering the capabilities of its hugely popular data visualization platform distilled from the experiences of top customers. Among the companies whose input has been incorporated into the manual is stalwart VMware Inc., which credits its success in implementing the software to close cooperation between IT and business teams.

The release of Drive marks the latest in Tableau’s efforts to push back against emerging competitors such as Zoomdata Inc., which provides a lighting-fast tool for interacting with real-time streams and other fast-moving workloads requiring rapid response times. The startup’s patented micro-query technology has netted it $17 million in Series B funding from Accel Partners this week, along with 20 paying customers since 2013, including a global pharmaceutical company. New Enterprise Associates, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Razor’s Edge Ventures and B7 also participated in the round, bumping Zoomdata’s total funding past the $20 million mark.