Datameer and Karmasphere, two competing upstart vendors offering reporting, data-visualization, and data-analysis capabilities on top of Hadoop, released new versions of their software on Monday. Both talked up the need for next-generation tools.

It's not that old-school business intelligence software tools are going away, these upstarts grant. But both portray batch-oriented extract-transform-load (ETL) data integration, relational data warehousing, and old-school analytics as too slow, rigid, and expensive to keep up in the big-data era.

Hadoop is the future, these vendor's contend, because it's a massively scalable data-management and analysis environment that can handle variably structure data from many sources--log files, clickstreams, sensor data, social media sources and so on--without the delays inherent in dealing with the static schemas of relational databases.

If companies want to look at recent point-of-sale transactions alongside Web site clickstreams, recent online enrollments, email campaign results, and social media chatter, for example, it would be difficult if not impossible to quickly put all that data into a relational data warehouse and look for correlations.

Datameer and Karmasphere offer integration, data-analysis, and data visualization products that run on Hadoop. They're two of the better-established companies hoping to provide what they describe as next-generation platforms. Founded in 2009 and 2005, respectively, Datameer and Karmasphere are private companies that each have a handful of nameable customers. Datameer points to blue chip Visa, among others, while Karmasphere says Intel and Microsoft are customers.

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