After a few brief weeks outside the spotlight, Hadoop is now back in the center of attention after Datameer Inc. raised another $40 million in funding to further pursue its vision of applying the open-source analytics framework to business intelligence. The investment tops off years of impressive growth in a segment known for its competitiveness.

The startup has signed up more than 200 customers for its namesake data processing platform since launching in 2009 including Visa Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other members of the Fortune 500 thanks to a one-stop-shop value proposition promising a unified environment for performing analytics. That has struck a chord amid the rapid increase in the complexity of business intelligence workloads.

The increased operational burden is largely due to the explosion of data that organizations are ingesting, which had long exceeded the capacity of traditional systems. Datameer takes advantage of the scalability of Hadoop to cost effectively store the unstructured information that accounts for the bulk of that growth and relegates the remainder to more conventional platform.

That integrated approach enables analysts to handle all of their data in one place, according to the company, which is useful in all kinds of scenarios. A decision-maker at an organization’s sales department, for instance, might want to correlate unstructured customer interactions with relational financial records to identify factors that could help increase revenue.

That user would then be able to visualize the results using Datameer’s native dashboarding capabilities, which can be supplemented through integration with third party tools such as Tableau and the premium extensions available from its online catalog. The comprehensive nature of the platform is also useful for the administrators in charge of managing the information being analyzed, who can centrally control who accesses what.

The new $40 million in funding from ST Telemedia, a branch of Singapore’s second largest state-owned investment fund, Top Tier Capital Partners and existing backers will help make that value proposition even more attractive. Datameer needs to do as much in order to keep up with the intensifying competition from other Hadoop-based business intelligence providers such as Platfora Inc., and AtScale Inc., which announced a funding round of its own two months ago.

The startup didn’t provide too many details on exactly how the capital  will be used, saying only that it plans to hire more people and accelerate global expansion. The appointment of ST Telemedia’s Nikhil Eapen, a veteran of the Asian enterprise technology scene, to Datameer’s board as part of the investment should help along the latter goal quite nicely.

Photo via Datameer