Analytics startup Kontagent is breaking the mold with the availability of kSuite DataMine, a SaaS offering that enables analysts to use Hive-powered, SQL-like queries to get data out of a Hadoop deployment. It’s meant to give insights that can help monetize mobile gaming – but if the idea catches on, it could change everything.

In the real world, your garden variety analytics dashboard can only tell you so much. After all, the underlying technology may be great, but it can only be used to answer questions that the designer thought of before the product shipped. That’s a lot of wasted data. But by combining Hive’s interface for Hadoop, a cloud delivery model, and what Kontagent describes in a blog entry as “unlimited query powers,” users get access to a potentially infinite supply of up-to-the-minute, actionable customer insights.

Kontagent’s kSuite in general and DataMine specifically are aimed at helping customers monetize mobile and social games, and most of the examples Kontagent give revolve around that business segment. But the core idea of a custom analytics interface for Hadoop delivered as a service is one with broad applicability.

The next wave of demands from the business units will focus on big data. It is already forcing companies to rethink how they store and share data. Apps are more data intensive , using multiple sources to do analytics, sentiment analysis and the rest.

As Hadoop matures, it’s attracting its own ecosystem of developers and service providers. In these relatively early days for big data, much of those services revolve around hosting a Hadoop cluster in the cloud or consulting on infrastructure deployment.

But the challenge is trying to decipher how to use the people and the resources at hand. People know SQL. Data scientists are scarce.

That means it’s important to consider the growing group of vendors that play in this market, including Rainstor, Drawn to Scale and Terremark.

But even beyond that, what is your infrastructure story for big data?  How do you fit this in with what you already have?

But the kind of enterprise that’s leveraging big data and analytics in the first place tends to have its infrastructure strategy well in hand already, and there’s a growing recognition that the real services opportunity lies in helping them figure out what data they have and how best to turn it into real insight. That’s where Kontagent kSuite DataMine fits in, letting customers turn existing SQL skills into an opportunity to play within their own data warehouses.