Business analytics firm Pentaho released a list of the core trends that are propelling the big data phenomenon, at least according to the company’s own perspective. Pentaho also took the opportunity to boast a revenue increase of no less than 340 percent between the first and second quarter of this year, which easily qualifies it as one of the fastest growing analytics players in the market.

Pentaho says that over 70 percent of the new customers in Q2 are deploying on Hadoop. The remaining 30 percent use NoSQL alternatives, mainly MongoDB and Cassandra, and purpose-build solutions from Greenplum and Vertica.

The firm lists broader adoption in the developer community and new use cases as the two first driving factors behind all this growth. The engineers that design, develop and roll out big data apps rely more and more on open-source technologies to meet their deadlines, while at the same time their organizations are applying this know-how to a broader range of areas. Customer behavior analytics, lead conversion analytics, security threat pattern analytics, social media marketing and supply chain optimization are among the new fields that Pentaho cited.

“We’ve been doing big data analytics for years and it shows with the success of our customers, partners and communities,” said Richard Daley, co-founder and chief strategy officer, Pentaho Corporation. “One of the most satisfying aspects of what we’re doing is how our users are changing the way they do business by leveraging big data in ways never possible before and doing so in an affordable way.”

The company also says that new visualization tools (including its own) are making big data accessible to not only the aforementioned developers but also the business users, who need to be able to gain insight and make decisions much faster than before. This is made possible thanks to the rapidly expanding Hadoop ecosystem, the fourth driver. Pentaho itself is directly involved in this vertical thanks to a recently reinforced alliance with Cloudera.

The firm points at convergence with other trends – namely the cloud and mobile – as the fifth big trend that makes big data increasingly viable for the enterprise.