No matter how sophisticated the analytics engine running under the hood, data is ultimately only as useful as the business user makes it. That’s the guiding philosophy of Adatao Inc., an emerging startup focusing on the human aspect of the information processing lifecycle. The startup surfaced on the industry’s radar this week after raising $13 million in a first round of funding led by venture capital powerhouse Andreesen Horowitz.

Led by Google Apps engineering director and retired professor Christopher Nguyen, the Sunnyvale-based Adatao offers a unique collaboration service  that attempts to bridge the language gap between Hadoop geeks and everyday enterprise workers. The offering is divided into two components: a “power layer” based on the ultra-fast Apache Spark processing framework that allows analysts to expose insights to end-users, and a simplified “beauty layer” that  empowers those end-users to consume that knowledge. Connecting the two planes is a set of communications capabilities which enable the data scientists to take questions about specific metrics in real-time and produce reports that provide relevant answers in an easily understandable format.

The investment, which also included contributions from Lightspeed Ventures and Bloomberg L.P.’s early-stage startup fund, marks a major step forward in Adatao’s efforts to capitalize on the market’s growing appetite for data visualization software a trend that RightScale Inc. also hopes to ride with its latest service. Fresh out of a nine-month beta, RightScale Cloud Analytics allows organizations to graphically track how much they’re spending across their public cloud accounts  and ships with complementary alerting functionality that helps financial teams stay on top of any cost overruns that may occur.

Sqrrl Inc., the startup behind the Apache Accumulo database, followed RightScale onto the data visualization bandwagon with the introduction of new bi-directional connector for Hunk, the Hadoop-based version of Splunk Inc.’s widely-used log analysis solution. Both offerings use the batch processing framework to store information and likewise share a common focus on security: Accumulo makes it possible to control access down to the cell level, while Hunk empowers users to visually dig into data generated at the network level for insight into malicious traffic. Through Sqrrl App for Hunk, joint customers are now able to leverage the granular control afforded by the graph database to handle their logs more responsibility and query information with greater ease through Splunk’s easy-to-use interface.

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