A month after acquiring Zaption Inc. for its online learning platform, Workday Inc. is making another strategic startup buy. The HR automation giant this week signed an agreement to purchase a venture-backed analytics provider called Platfora Inc. that sells Apache Spark-powered business intelligence software.

The outfit harnesses the open-source analytics engine’s performance to help organizations quickly identify patterns in their massive information troves. Platfora claims that the functionality lends itself to a wide range of use cases. The software can be used to map out customer buying patterns, find areas of improvement in a company’s marketing campaigns and expose operational inefficiencies.

The platform was originally geared mainly toward expert data scientists but recently received an update that made its capabilities accessible for everyday business users as well. Platfora product veep Peter Schlampp (pictured) stopped by theCUBE, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, in late March to explain the changes.

“A lot business questions are being answered by data scientists who are more willing to go out and use a new tool [and] ask different types of questions. But the reality is there are tens of thousands of business analysts in large organizations … that use tools like Tableau and Excel,” Schlampp said. “What we wanted to do is extend Big Data into those peoples’ hands.”

George Gilbert, Big Data and analytics analyst for Wikibon Research, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said the acquisition gives Workday more tools for working with data streaming into its data lakes. “Since this data is raw and doesn’t have much structure, Platfora includes features for cleaning up the data and finding the information needles in the data haystack,” he said. “Platfora also includes much richer ways to visualize and analyze the information than traditional tools so that users could iteratively visualize it, clean it up and structure some more, and then iterate on the process.”

In the wake of this week’s acquisition, the startup’s development roadmap is set to take on an entirely new dimension. Mike Frandsen, Workday’s executive vice president of products, support and delivery, a hinted in a blog post that Platfora’s technology will be integrated into his firm’s financial management service and upcoming supply chain automation offering. The vendor may also use the software to enhance its flagship HR platform, which could benefit even more from new analytics functionality. After all, practically every organization is interested in gaining a better understanding of worker productivity and finding ways to improve output.

But while Workday customers have a lot to look forward to, the same can’t necessarily be said for Platfora’s users. There’s a chance that the startup will stop supporting its platform and dedicate its entire attention to the HR giant’s internal analytics efforts after the acquisition is completed.

The deal is expected to become official later this year. No financial terms were disclosed, but since the startup raised over $95 million in outside funding, it’s probably safe to assume the transaction is worth nine figures.

Here’s theCUBE‘s full interview from BigDataSV in March:

Disclosure: Platfora was a sponsor of BigDataSV but had no control over editorial material.

 Image from Platfora