Business owners looking to quickly and easily make sense of data stored in Hadoop have a new option: Altiscale Insight Cloud, a self-service analytics solution for big data.

The new solution replaces more complex, expensive alternatives that require heavy IT involvement, said Raymie Stata, CEO of Altiscale Inc. It allows business users to access and analyze data themselves using familiar business intelligence (BI) tools such as Microsoft Excel and tools from Tableau Software

Insight Cloud allows business analysts to be able to, without IT’s help, reach into the data lake and pull information into this intermediary space and run rapid analytics and have it visualized through a BI tool, said Barbara Lewis, vice president of marketing at Altiscale.

“That’s important because today if people want to do things like that, they have to wait for an overwhelmed IT team to try and pull that data into an expensive proprietary system that generally is not as fast as Hadoop in the Insight Cloud,” she said.

The decision to create this offering came about because of conversations Altiscale had with its enterprise customers. Over the past 12 months, business leadership has been asking for increased access and analysis of company data, Lewis said. Big data conversations have moved out of IT and into the business departments.

“Business leadership is more and more in the driver’s seat where they’re not necessarily saying, ‘I want Hadoop,’ but they’re saying, ‘I want better fraud analytics,” for example. And they’re saying, ‘I want more in-depth customer information,’ and that’s driven by the CMO,” Lewis said. “They’re putting pressure on the IT team to help get them there as quickly as possible.”

The ability to quickly access and analyze data enables businesses to make faster decisions and be more agile, Stata said.

Insight Cloud “solves the challenge of bringing big data to a broader range of users, so that enterprises can quickly develop new offerings, better target customers and respond to shifting market or operational conditions,” he said. “It’s a faster and easier way to get from big data infrastructure to insights that drive real business value.”

Stata said Insight Cloud achieves its speed and simplicity through a converged architecture, eliminating the need for a separate relational data store for aggregated data. This reduces the cost and management burden on the organization, while allowing easier scalability from tens of terabytes to petabytes. The converged architecture also minimizes data movement and replication across environments.

Insight Cloud is generally available today. Pricing starts at $9,000 per month, and it’s based on data volume and processing time used. And it includes the Altiscale Data Cloud, with the same volume charges applying.

Photo credit: JohnGoode via photopin cc