Business intelligence provider Pentaho picked up Webdetails, a Portuguese consultancy that has designed numerous plugins for its software over the course of the past few years. The 20-strong team is best known for its Community Tools, or “CTools”, a set of free utilities for creating dashboards and reports.

Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, the acquisition is described as a talent buy. The Webdetails crew will contribute its visual interface development expertise to bolster Pentaho’s consulting services, and also to expand the number of data visualizations available for the company’s development tools. Founder Pedro Alves, a prominent member of Pentaho’s open-source community, will continue to be in charge of both Webdetails and developer relations for his new employer.

“Everything about Webdetails perfectly complements our operations as we continue to scale to meet demand fueled by the big data revolution,” said Doug Johnson, EVP and COO of Pentaho.” Webdetails’ expertise in high-end visualizations brings capabilities to help customers roll out exceptional visualizations with all data sources, particularly in Big Data. With Webdetails joining the Pentaho family we gain visual development talent, international consulting services and a highly respected open source community leader in Pedro.”

Data visualization is a key driver for the Big Data market. The ability to digest raw data and process it into actionable insights is only one aspect of analytics; information also has to make its way to business users in a timely manner. That’s where Pentaho comes in

In February, the company introduced the latest version of its flagship data visualization product. Pentaho Business Analytics 4.8 features a set of templates that automate data stream management so that users can concentrate their efforts on analyzing data rather than taking care of the plumbing.