Despite the deafening buzz around hyperscale and OpenStack, the Big Data ecosystem continued along on its path of growth this week, with Altiscale pulling the curtains back on a hosted platform built from the ground up to run Hadoop.

The newly launched Altiscale Data Cloud is designed specifically for organizations that lack the technical expertise of their web-scale peers but face the same challenges in extracting value from unstructured information. It leverages patent-pending “auto-elasticity” technology to optimize capacity based on job usage, and comes with an enterprise-grade service-level agreement (SLA) that blows Amazon’s out of the water. To top it off, the service is charged monthly to simplify budgeting.

“We believe that HaaS will eventually dominate the market,” predicted Raymie Stata, the co-founder and chief executive of Altiscale. Before establishing the startup, he served as chief architect and CTO at Yahoo. “The reason is straightforward: firms should be focused on using Hadoop effectively, not wrestling with the infrastructure and operational challenges required to run it well. At Altiscale, you can be up and running in a day, and scale from development to production instantly, paying only for the resources you use.”

Meanwhile, enterprise data warehouse vendor Teradata introduced a product-service bundle designed to let SAP customers have their cake and eat it, too, tearing down legacy silos without abandoning existing IT investments. Dubbed Teradata Analytics for SAP, the offering enables users to correlate operational data from their business intelligence (BI) apps with financial performance using the Teradata Database, which packs more than 1,000 built-in analytics functions.

Over on the NoSQL front, MongoHQ updated its database-as-a-service solution with a new security auditing tool and an internally-developed two-factor authentication solution called Authful. The company is also releasing a free security handbook for startups.