IT operations intelligence firm Blazent, Inc. is giving its data discovery and quality management platform a Big Data makeover with a series of enhancements aimed at improving scalability and speed.

Blazent’s software reaches out to assets across the enterprise – ranging from systems management databases to backup devices to individual PCs – and pulls information into a warehouse that can be used to make more intelligent decisions about managing resources. The company has developed more than 230 connectors that tap into a wide range of systems management, software inventory, security, directory and other sources and consolidates them into a master database. Its products are often used to compile a master configuration management database (CMDB) for use in service management and asset tracking.

“We have a view of the enterprise [IT environment] that we believe is the most complete view possible,” said Blazent Chief Product Architect Michael Ludwig.

The privately held firm targets data quality problems that Gartner has estimated scuttle 40 percent of all IT initiatives. CEO Gary Oliver cited the example of one customer that implemented Blazent and discovered 300 servers that weren’t being backed up on a regular basis. Such disconnects can occur for easily overlooked reasons, such as firewalls blocking access or IP addresses changing on targeted equipment. And, of course, there’s human error.

Blazent addresses data quality problems by harvesting data directly from the source equipment and software and then running validation and comparison routines to assess accuracy. The firm is able to algorithmically resolve many of the duplication and consistency errors that flummox IT auditors. “We’re able to create a single record that is the widest and most accurate representation of all knowledge about an entity,” Ludwig said.

The new release adds support for the Cassandra NoSQL database, Hadoop data store and Apache Spark processing engine, providing a significant boost in capacity compared to the Oracle database and Apache Tomcat server that powered the previous version.

A new Data Explorer visualization engine provides a simpler way to users to report and drill down on information and also now supports custom dashboards for different users and profiles. Finally, an analytics tool called GLOVE (Governance, Lifecycle Operational Validation, Expenditure) can be used to visualize the lifecycle status of billed or allocated entities for more accurate accounting. It’s aimed primarily at managed service providers that manage large IT portfolios.

The company expects to add predictive analytics capabilities in a fall release so that IT administrators can anticipate future problems or resource constraints. Blazent is available as a hosted service on the Amazon, Verizon and Terremark Worldwide, Inc. clouds.