The Hadoop ecosystem is growing even more crowded today with the launch of a new startup called Arcadia Data Inc. that hopes to help business analysts become more productive in how they analyze their vast troves of unstructured information. Its plan for achieving that goal revolves around a homegrown business intelligence platform that runs directly on the framework.

Arcadia Enterprise uses the clustered architecture of Hadoop to carry out analytic operations directly on the servers where the data is stored instead of moving data back and forth from a dedicated business intelligence environment as traditional alternatives do. That saves a great deal of overhead and allows results to be returned that much faster as a consequence, performance on which the startup builds with value-added capabilities.

The platform provides a drag-and-drop interface for building automated analytic workflows that Arcadia says can incorporate files not only from Hadoop but also traditional relational databases and data warehouses. Users can share their creations with peers and visualize the resulting insights using a built-in dashboarding component.

That value proposition puts Arcadia in the same league as a number of other Hadoop-based business intelligence providers including Datameer, Inc. and IBM, which are all competing for the same relatively narrow segment of organizations using the framework in production. That crowdedness has already taken its toll, with another player called Karmasphere, Inc. having had to sell itself to FICO Corp. last year due to lackluster adoption.

But Arcadia has nonetheless managed to stand out from the pack and already boasts several big-name customers at launch, including Hewlett-Packard Co., Marketshare, Inc. and a number of others. But it’s not only customers that are buying into its pitch.

Arcadia announced the completion of a $11.5 million round from Mayfield Fund, Blumberg Capital and Intel’s investment arm against the backdrop of the launch to help attract more users and expand its product lineup. The first addition is a standalone implementation of the data visualization component its platform designed to give prospective buyers a taste of what to expect.

The module is available for for free with the demo version of Hortonworks, Inc.’s open-source Hadoop distribution, while the full Arcadia Enterprise platform slated to follow suit into general availability towards the end of the year.