Commercial Hadoop distributer MapR had some big news today from the Stracture big data conference. It revealed a whole new line-up of data connectivity options that extend the range of applications and database clients running its platform can connect to.

The functionality is available in multiple forms. One is an ODBC driver MapR developed in collaboration with  Simba Technologies, which enables users to import and export their data to every app that supports the DBMS interface.

In addition, MapR announced partnerships with three big data firms through which it  offers connectivity to HDFS, HBase, Hive, Pig and its own Direct Access NFS.  The company has teamed up with visualization tool makers Pentaho and Tableau, as well as Talend in a move that will make MapR’s distro not only more open but also more attractive to prospects looking to get the data closer to the business user.

“We are excited to be contributing the breadth of our integration technology to facilitate Hadoop’s deployment and comprehensiveness,” said Keith Goldstein, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances for Talend. “By providing a graphical development layer that abstracts the technical complexity of Hadoop, we are taking the difficulty out of Hadoop integration. Talend makes it easy to bring relevant enterprise data into Hadoop, cleanse this data and move it to analytics platforms — all of this without coding.”

The other Hadoop news today come from Logicworks, which announced a portfolio of managed infrastructure services dedicated to the open-source big data engine. Among them is the handling of the ‘big traffic’ that comes with analyzing massive unstructured data sets, and the fact Logicworks offers Hadoop on Isilon hardware. These are only two items on a longer list, although the latter is quite significant considering EMC itself has decided to couple the two technologies in the form of an appliance.