The web-scale crowd reaffirmed its place at the forefront of the analytics movement last week with the introduction of several new technologies aimed at helping the rest of the industry try to catch up. Airbnb Inc. jumped to the head of the line after open sourcing a homegrown query engine for Hadoop.

The framework takes simplifying knowledge discovery a step further than most of the other options in its category, which merely bridge the gap between the data scientist and the only slightly less savvy business analyst. It provides a clean visual interface that the trendy apartment-sharing startup claims has so far allowed over a third of its employees to interact with Hadoop.

Airbnb hopes that releasing the underlying code for others to freely implement in their environments will help make the capabilities of the data crunching platform accessible to the majority of enterprise workers whose experience with manipulating data only extends to GUI applications. Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to simplify the experience for the developers who write those applications.

The software giant released a document store for its public cloud in conjunction with Airbnb’s launch that can natively accommodate the kind of unstructured data flowing among web services and connected devices. That means developers don’t have to jump through hoops in order to make information accessible to their users, which reduces the amount of time and effort required to build an application on Microsoft’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Simplifying data management is one of best ways a cloud provider can differentiate in the analytics era , but Redmond is not the only one offering to make it easier for customers to handle their information. Google added a message broker to its competing platform in the same time frame as the database’s debut that promises to automate communications among the different components of an application.

Pub/Sub is a managed implementing of the message broker powering its internal systems that can save developers the hassle of deploying an open-source distribution system themselves and then having to manually scale that setup as their workload requirements change over time. The addition puts Google in a that much better position to compete against Microsoft and Amazon, which have long offered similar functionality on their respective platforms.