It’s been an exciting month for the Big Data ecosystem, with Cloudera repackaging its portfolio in an effort to make Hadoop more accessible to organizations of different sizes. Two emerging players also made headlines with new solutions for developing analytical applications.

Announced on Monday, the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub combines the vendor’s open source distribution with a set of “advanced components” that consists of HBase, the Impala structured query engine and homegrown search and auditing tools. The offering also includes across-the-board support services and integration with Spark, an in-memory alternative to MapReduce that executes queries up to 100 times faster.

Organizations that don’t need all this extra functionality can opt to go with the Flex Edition, a slimmed down version of the Enterprise Data Hub that comes with just one premium. For the most economic-minded organizations, Cloudera is offering a Basic Edition that features only the core Hadoop distro plus support.

Over on the NoSQL front, Orchestrate launched a cloud-based service that allows developers to use a single API for accessing and managing information across different databases. The firm says that this abstraction reduces complexity and empowers users to drive more value from their data. The platform supports text search, graph, activity feed, time-ordered event and key-value queries, with more types to come.

Concurrent is taking a different approach to streamlining the development of data-driven apps. The company last week introduced a free performance monitoring tool that aims to simplify the maintenance of software built using Cascading, an open source Java framework for Hadoop. Dubbed Driven, the solution tracks data flows at runtime to ensure information quality and includes a broad set of metrics around program logic, giving operations professionals visibility into application behavior.

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