After a six-month private beta, Platfora’s BI solution of the same name is now generally available. The platform eliminates need to use data warehousing and ETL software in conjunction with Hadoop by taking a “fundamentally different approach to Big Data analytics” that makes it possible to extract insights within hours rather than days.

Platfora partnered up with all of the major Hadoop distributors, including Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks and EMC Greenplum, to deliver support for the most widely-used commercial versions of the analytics framework. The startup is offering its product as an on-premise solution or as a subscription-based service that is priced on a per server, per year basis.

“The promise of Hadoop and Big Data is enormous — that companies can flow diverse data from across the enterprise into a ‘data reservoir’ and have business users directly and immediately derive value from it. That promise has remained elusive,” said Ben Werther, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Platfora.

“Our customers have seen their worlds open up to new possibilities of data analysis with our product. Platfora puts every business user directly in touch with all of this data in a visually rich and immediate way that lets them make better decisions today.”

Less than two weeks ago Werther stopped by theCube to discuss his company’s offering in greater detail (see full video below). The CEO explained that Platfora serves as an “intelligent cache’ that distills data based on real-time changes in context, and said that his startup’s goal is to make insights easily accessible for decision-makers that lack the skillset to extract them on their own.  This emphasis on data availability is the reason that Platfora features a rapid installation wizard and support for HTML5.

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