The best way to drive the adoption of a software product, especially one aimed at developers, is releasing the code for free, which is what Keen IO Inc. has done with its cloud-based analytics service this week. The underlying logic is now available on GitHub for anyone to modify and implement as they see fit.

Data Explorer started its life shortly after the startup launched four years ago as a framework for automating the visualization of unstructured data, particularly events such as ad clicks and in-app purchases that are too numerous for a person to piece together into a cohesive picture on their own. Keen is still pursuing its original focus but has since expanded the value proposition beyond developers to business users.

The incarnation of Data Explorer that was made available under an open-source license can not only serve as a building block for user-developed applications and sites but also as a standalone service in its own right. Keen IO envisions its software being used in scenarios where conventional alternatives don’t justify the cost or simply require too much work.

Data Explorer offers a selection of several pre-implemented graph types that then user can automatically populate with the more than 100 different kinds of events supported out of the box. They are then able to share the resulting visualizations with their colleagues thanks to an embedding option that also comes handy on the consumer-facing side in marketing activities and the like.

Keen IO presumably hopes that offering Data Explorer under an open-source license will help boost its commercial hosted implementation, if for no other reason than the fact that more users are likely to take interest in its value proposition now that the core capabilities are available at no charge. It’s the same strategy another analytics startup called Datatorrent Inc. has recently begun pursuing with its stream processing engine for Hadoop.

Only time will tell whether their plans will work out as intended. Until then, organizations have two more free technologies to incorporate into their analytics projects.

Photo via Keen IO