Partners are essential to Hewlett-Packard Co.’s plans to deliver an integrated data processing platform for the enterprise, and a core component of that unified analytics vision is Vertica, the database it obtained as part of the acquisition of its namesake developer back in 2011. HP has brought the two elements together at its second annual Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston this week, where the product booths lining the show floor almost serve as lights along the trajectory of the ecosystem.

Ease-of-use continues to be a major focus.  Pentaho Inc. kicked off the second day of the event with the introduction of a new pre-packaged workflow system aimed at reducing the amount of work that goes into readying unstructured information for processing, a task that is estimated to take up as much as 80 percent of the resources spent on analytics projects.

Dubbed Streamlined Data Refinery, the product line is one of four “blueprints” the company has developed to complement its flagship business intelligence platform, which layers modeling and dashboarding capabilities over Hadoop to make it possible for analysts to work with their data where it’s stored. The add-on provides a graphic interface that Pentaho says allows users to quickly organize information within the batch processing framework and then push it to down to their Vertica environments. Once there, datasets can be integrated with other sources, sliced and diced as needed and made available to front-end applications.

Within hours of Streamlined Data Refinery making its debut, Logi Analytics, Inc., another business intelligence startup, also added support for Vertica with a new connector that serves a similar purpose the Pentaho blueprint: Spare customers the hassle of manually moving information into the database. The integration spans the full breadth of Logi’s portfolio, which consists of three services capable of working in the cloud:  a visual drag-and-drop analysis tool, a complementary role-based integration and discovery solution that likewise places an emphasis on user-friendless and a reporting app that enables workers to share insights with peers.

The firm claims that Logi Vision for HP Vertica can be set up in a few days, which is a short time by enterprise standards. The release builds on an existing partnership between the two companies that dates back to August 2013.

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