Big Data-as-a-Service provider Altiscale Inc. wants to make it easier than ever for its customers to get to grips with their data, and its teaming up with Tableau Software to do just that.

The two companies have just announced a strategic partnership they say will “bring the visual agility of Tableau to Altiscale customers” at a time when enterprises are increasingly turning to Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark as a means of storing and analyzing their data, both structured and unstructured.

Altiscale already has Hadoop and Spark covered with its recently launched Altiscale Insight Cloud, a secure, scalable and interactive analytics platform that allows business users to access and analyze data using a variety of business intelligence (BI) tools. The idea behind today’s partnership is that it makes it even easier for business analysts, IT professionals, and data scientists to analyze and visualize company data stored in Hadoop

“The volumes of market, product, and customer data that enterprises are rapidly accumulating will serve as the motive force behind the next wave of business innovation,” said Raymie Stata, CEO, Altiscale. “Today, this data, typically stored in Hadoop, is primarily the province of programmers and data engineers. With this new Tableau partnership, this high-potential information will be available more broadly within an organization to the tens of thousands of business analysts and other business professionals who use Tableau on a daily basis.”

The Altiscale Insight Cloud isn’t exactly cheap at $9,000 a month, but it’s definitely one of the more affordable ways for companies to make tools like Hadoop and Spark accessible to a large swathe of their employees. When paired with Tableau’s software, which is widely used in the enterprise due to its ease of use, it suddenly becomes possible for literally thousands of people to access, analyze, visualize and share company data, something that simply wasn’t possible before for a large number of organizations.

“Altiscale shares our mission to help people see and understand their data,” said Dan Kogan, Director of Product Marketing at Tableau. “Partnerships with leading Hadoop and Spark providers such as Altiscale help us to bring rich visual analytics to anyone within the enterprise looking to derive value from data.”

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