Silicon Valley’s enterprise technology giants actively invest in their partner ecosystems to drive revenue growth. This often encompasses not only go-to-market support but also direct financial backing, with the latest example coming from Splunk Inc.

The publicly traded analytics provider today joined a $15.8 million funding round into Insight Engines Inc., a startup that focuses on easing the detection of threats in corporate infrastructure. Its claim to fame is a tool that provides the ability to inspect security logs with Splunk’s powerful data-crunching platform using plain-English queries.

Insight Engines’ natural language approach has several upsides. The first is that security staff is spared the trouble of learning Splunk’s complex analytics syntax before they can start looking for threats. Checking the scope of a breach, for instance, can be as straightforward as typing the question, “How many users logged into the infected system?”

A lower learning curve, in turn, means that companies have to spend less on talent acquisition and training existing personnel. But Insight Engines is not positioning its software as a replacement for domain expertise. Besides making Splunk accessible for more security professionals, the startup said, the tool can also help power users become more productive by automating tasks that normally require hours of manual coding.

The ability to substitute custom queries with natural language commands has the potential to come handy in other areas as well. To address the opportunity, Insight Engines will invest the new funds in expanding its capabilities beyond security to fields such as business analytics, infrastructure monitoring and application troubleshooting.

The startup is one of several emerging players that are using natural language processing to simplify data processing. Also on the list is Demisto Inc., which offers a chatbot that can quickly pull up security information and perform analysis upon request. Bigger names are starting to join the fray as well. Google Inc. added voice controls to its web analytics service earlier this week that let users simply ask for the metrics they’re after.

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