Splunk Inc., a provider of a software platform for real-time operational intelligence, and Tableau Software, a provider of business analytics software, have formed a strategic alliance to combine the power of advanced visual analytics and real-time machine data.
As part of a joint technology investment, the latest version of Tableau software (8.1) includes Splunk Enterprise as a native data source using Splunk’s recently launched ODBC driver. “This is a product investment that the companies have made as part of a broader strategic technology alliance and we expect with this announcement the ability for Tableau users who are on the business side to get direct access to index machine data that is in Splunk for business analytics. That was not possible before,” said Tapan Bhatt, vice president of business analytics, at Splunk. “Essentially, what it does is broaden the scope of analytics that they can do on structured data to include machine-generated data.”
Previously, in order to access machine data, Tableau uses would connect to spreadsheets and atabses, and web forces like Salesforce and Google Analytics, said Ted Wasserman, a member of the product management team at Tableau.
In addition to the direct connection between Splunk and Tableau making it easier for Tableau users to visualize machine data, the integration enables users to correlate, analyze and visualize machine data with other structured data for advanced business analytics.
The integration also provides direct access to saved searches within Splunk Enterprise 6 from Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server, using Splunk’s new ODBC driver, for further data exploration and visualization.
The Tableau mission is to help people see and understand data no matter where that data is – in spreadsheets, databases, Hadoop, the cloud, or in Splunk, said Wasserman. “There is a ton of highly valuable and rich data that Splunk is connecting and indexing that business users are vying to tap into to get further insights when they make decisions. For us, it is really about providing new ways to get data into Tableau to help users make data-driven decisions.”