It’s not only large incumbent vendors that are turning to acquisitions in an effort to catch up with the rapid evolution of enterprise technology requirements. Cloudability Inc. marked its third buyout in as many quarters this morning after announcing the purchase of a fellow startup called DataHero Inc. that offers a hosted dashboarding tool for visualizing information from off-premise services.

Its main selling point is an easy-to-use graphical interface that is specially geared toward everyday workers without any experience in using traditional business intelligence software. Pre-included chart templates make it possible to quickly assemble raw metrics into an organized form that can be searched for patterns using drag-and-drop filters. DataHero claims that its service is capable of visualizing everything from website traffic statistics to sales records, but Cloudability only has one specific use case in mind.

The company will incorporate the functionality into its namesake cloud spending management tool to address the growing complexity of its customers’  technology budgets. Organizations that were using only a handful of external services when Cloudability entered the market five years ago are now employing dozens, each of which is tracked and billed separately. The self-service visualization capabilities of DataHero will enable decision-makers to visually identify cost-cutting opportunities that currently require complicated manual analysis and thereby potentially shave weeks off the assessment process.

The software will complement the benchmarking toolkit Cloudability gained through its purchase of RipFrog Inc. last year, which helps compare spending across departments and teams. The company didn’t share the financial terms of any of its acquisitions, including DataHero, but the fact that the visualization startup garnered $10 million in external funding and some 200 customers before the sale suggests that its 12-strong team received a significant payout.

Image via Cloudability