As the venture capital community’s enthusiasm for cloud computing and analytics reaches new heights, the startups at the intersection of the two trends are reaping the rewards. The newest beneficiary is Qubole Inc., which raised $30 million in funding from private equity giant IVP and three existing backers this morning to widen the adoption of its on-demand Hadoop implementation.

What sets the Qubole Data Service apart is a relatively simple interface that masks the complexity of the analytics framework to help organizations make use of its capabilities more easily. After retrieving the information they wish to process using the startup’s pre-packaged connectors, a business user can put together a query in its graphical workbench and let the algorithms under the hood take it from there. The platform allocates hardware resources needed for a particular request and immediately frees up the infrastructure after everything is done to minimize overhead.

That high level of automation enables customers to take advantage of Hadoop and its surrounding ecosystem of components to a much fuller extent than they would be able to in a manually-managed deployment. In one scenario, the Qubole Data Service could be leveraged to run a quick ad hoc query on Spark and then immediately switch over to MapReduce for a large batch analysis. The startup plans to spend the capital from its new funding round on growing the choice of processing engines in its the platform so as to accommodate more use cases.

One of the first items on the agenda is enabling users to process machine-generated data from the connected universe, which typically comes in fast-moving streams. That suggests Storm and Samza, the two most popular frameworks for performing real-time processing on Hadoop, are among the scheduled additions to the platform. While it’s at it, Qubole also plans to give customers the ability to run its service on other public clouds than the three currently supported. A likely candidate is IBM’s SoftLayer with its heavy focus on analytics.

Last but not least, the startup will expand its sales efforts in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region to acquire more international customers. The process will be overseen by IVP partner Somesh Dash, who is joining its board of directors as part of his firm’s investment. Overall, Qubole has raised a total of $50 million in outside funding to date compared to the $42 million boasted by Altiscale Inc., its top competitor.

Image via Geralt