The scalability and cost-efficiency that make Hadoop so attractive for organizations looking to extract the long-term historical patterns hidden in their unstructured data can also come handy at a more tactical level, but repurposing a technology built for one end to another is not a trivial undertaking. That’s the challenge AtScale Inc. hopes to overcome with its new $7 million in funding.

The capital will help fuel the development of its namesake analytics engine, which automates the logistics of carrying out the quick analyses that  help business workers inform the execution of strategic goals set based on the more complex trends their organizations glean using Hadoop. The AtScale Intelligence Platform determines the quickest way to fulfill each query and then pipes the results to the customer’s business intelligence platform of choice for interpretation.

That allows users to improve their calculations through trial and error without having to wait minutes or potentially even hours between changes, which can help produce more accurate insights. In a time when enterprises are growing more and more dependant on their information for decision-making, that’s an invaluable benefit that has helped make AtScale’s value proposition particularly compelling.

The startup boasts that its platform is finding use across a broad range of segments ranging from retail to online gaming, a list that the new funding should help expand even further. The biggest portion of the capital came from the investment arm of Taiwanese chip giant United Microelectronics Corporation, with the rest split among AME Ventures, Storm Ventures, XSeed Capital and, most notably, Cloudera Inc. co-founder Amr Awadallah.

The round comes just as another startup is gearing up to emerge from stealth with a similar solution for running quick multi-dimensional analyses on Hadoop that already boasts several customers. The imminent launch may pose an obstacle to AtScale’s growth streak, but the new funding puts it at an advantage for the time being.

Photo via Stefano Bertolo