Another day, another startup tackling the challenges of Big Data. Altiscale, the brainchild of former Yahoo chief architect and CTO Raymie Stata, today announced the general availability of Altiscale Data Cloud, its new Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) platform. With only $12 million in Series A funding, Altiscale can’t hope to match the scale or affordability of Amazon Elastic MapReduce—nor is it trying to.

The company is differentiating with Altiscale Data Cloud, a purpose-built Big Data cloud that offers a service-level agreement (SLA) that the company says is far superior to that of AWS. Altiscale Data Cloud also offers a set of enterprise features designed to help customers drive more value from their analytics investments.

Raymie Stata

The new offering aims to fill a major gap in the Big Data market: Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Jeff Kelly estimates that the average company realizes a mere 55-cent return on every dollar spent on Big Data. According to Altistate CEO Stata, HaaS will eventually dominate the market. “The reason is straightforward,” he said. “Firms should be focused on using Hadoop effectively, not wrestling with the infrastructure and operational challenges required to run it well. At Altiscale, you can be running in a day, and scale from development to production instantly, paying only for the resources you use.”

The Altiscale Data Cloud includes a patent-pending “auto-elasticity” feature that provisions resources based on real-time usage data, enabling customers to run Hadoop more cost-effectively than on a traditional cluster. Additionally, the service is priced on a monthly basis, not charged by the hour like AWS and other developer-oriented offerings. This, the company says, is more convenient for companies that need to keep IT costs predictable.

Subscriptions include support services provided by a “Hadoop operations team” that monitors MapReduce jobs to ensure that user applications are running smoothly.

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this story.