Business users looking to access and analyze big data have a new option: Platfora 5.2.

Announced yesterday at Strata + Hadoop World, Platfora 5.2 enables “citizen data scientists” to do their own data preparation, visual analysis and behavioral analytics using any business intelligence (BI) tool. It gives them the power to get fast answers to business questions about customer behavior and segmentation, for example.

“Getting value out of big data is more than just slicing and dicing billions of records, and it can’t only be the domain of a data scientist. It requires discovering what you have and getting the data ready for analysis to use without boundaries,” said Peter Schlampp, vice president of products at Platfora Inc. in a news release. “Platfora 5.2 opens up the transformative power of big data to business users by enabling them to use the BI tools they know and love.”

Platfora 5.2 includes the following features and technical enhancements that make it possible for both business and technical users to integrate their preferred BI tools:

• Native Tableau Integration: Users can directly export prepared data in TDE format to Tableau Desktop or schedule data pushes automatically to Tableau Server.

• Lens-Accelerated SQL: The lenses, according to the company, make access to petabyte-scale data hundreds of times faster than querying the data directly. In this new release, any BI tool can query lenses live via SparkSQL and ODBC.

• Run on Hadoop Cluster: Thanks to the development and maturity of the YARN resource manager for Hadoop, IT departments can run Platfora directly on the Hadoop cluster or in the traditional dedicated configuration.

• Enhanced Vizboards: Data visualization is improved with responsive layouts, better default visualizations and consistent use of color.

Joao Tapadinhas, Research Director at Gartner, called big data discovery tools such as Platfora 5.2 “the missing link that will make big data go mainstream.” In a presentation he gave with Gartner analyst Dan Sommer, he said it broadens the base of people able to use it.

“Big data discovery will help advance the analytics maturity of the organization, will start training some of the future data scientists, can provide the first batch of insights that may raise awareness to new opportunities and may provide enough return on investment to justify the business case for big data analytics,” he said.

Platfora 5.2 is generally available now. An annual subscription based on a Platfora node (no end user licensing) for enterprise deployments starts at $90,000. Lens-Accelerated SQL and Run on Hadoop Cluster are available to Platfora customers in private beta in Platfora 5.2.

Photo by Lic. Marcos Gasparutti