For all the talk of increased automation in data collection and processing, information is only as useful as what the user can make of it. That once again emerged as the dominant theme in the analytics market last week, with several vendors making significant progress in their efforts to make insights more accessible to enterprise workers.

MapR Technologies Inc. set the wheels in motion on Tuesday with news that its structured query technology for Hadoop, Drill, has been accepted into the Apache Software Foundation as a top-level project. Drill’s graduation represents a significant vote of confidence in the tool, which manages to set itself apart in a highly crowded market with unique functionality that allows business users to manipulate data without having the IT department manually normalize it first. That functionality not only saves time and effort but also makes it possible for data models to more easily accommodate changing business conditions as well as real-time data.

Drill isn’t the only project promising to make data more consumable for everyday business workers. Also falling into that category is Vertica, one of the two technologies Hewlett-Packard Co. released under a cloud-based subscription model last week as part of its efforts to foster the development of third party analytics application. The database provides a similar syntax to Drill but comes with an expensive collection of pre-built functions that automate many complex functions that users have traditionally had to write manually. It’s joined by the IDOL natural language processing and search technology, which HP said simplifies the query process even further to an almost Google-like experience.

Together, the solutions constitute the heart of HP’s much-touted HAVEn analytics suite, which powers many of its newer software offerings. HP also launched a new information lifecycle management suite that it says helps organizations track their data with greater transparency.

ThreatStream Inc. is applying analytics to security with its OPTIC service, which promises to alert practitioners of threats before they become disasters. The startup revealed on Thursday that it has bagged another $22 million in funding from Catalyst Partners, Google Ventures and Paladin Capital Group to expand the adoption of the product which is already relied on by over 1,000 users across the enterprise and the public sector.

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