The big Hadoop vendors Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies grab most of the headlines due to their primary focus on large organizations, but there’s another set of companies offering Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) to meet demand from companies with limited IT resources.

Vendors like Altiscale and Bigstep are leading the HaaS charge, and now business intelligence specialist Datameer is hoping to piggyback on their success. The company, which offers software for easily analyzing data stored in on-premise Hadoop solutions, has just unveiled a new cloud-based version of its Big Data analytics platform called Datemeer Professional, designed to run on top of Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) offerings.

In an email interview, Matt Schumpert, Director of Product Management at Datameer, said Hadoop’s success among larger enterprises was convincing smaller organizations that they too can benefit from direct and immediate access to their data. He described Datameer Professional as a more affordable and fully managed version of Datameer’s Enterprise version, that allows individual business units or data-driven departments like marketing, finance, and product management to deploy Hadoop independently.

“Datameer Professional is the first Big Data analytics platform designed for Hadoop-as-a-service environments, and is targeted for departmental deployments,” said Schumpert. “There is a growing demand for Hadoop in the cloud as business users with limited IT resources or Hadoop expertise want direct and immediate access to a big data analytics capability.”

Datameer’s great strength is that it targets organizations that generally lack the expertise to deploy their own Hadoop solutions. The cloud version of its software integrates with Altiscale and Bigstep’s HaaS services, and simplifies everything by providing a single self-service Big Data application. Rather than hiring difficult-to-find data scientists, companies can simply deploy Datameer to quickly and easily analyze and visualize their Big Data through a simple point-and-click and spreadsheet-like user interface. It means that almost any employee can access, integrate, analyze and visualize the company’s data to suit their own needs.

It’s a compelling offering in its own right, but the biggest appeal with Datameer Professional is the speed of deployment it offers. Schumpert said the new offering gives almost instantanous access to Big Data insights, because organizations don’t need to wait for their IT departments to deploy Hadoop on-premise.

“Traditionally, it would take a matter of weeks or months to deploy an enterprise-grade on-premise Hadoop environment, including software vendor evaluation, and server and network provisioning,” Schumpert explained. With Datameer Professional, companies can reduce the time to deployment to mere hours.

“The goal is to help different departments discover new use cases and encourage the entire company to become data-driven,” he added.

As for Datameer itself, the new product means its sales teams have much greater flexibility to move into customers at the department level, and eventually move that sale to IT to build a centralized data hub to bring all of the data together, regardless of the source or type of Datameer implementation the company is using.