Making Hadoop data more accessible has become a common goal in the world of enterprise software, and on Thursday a brand-new contender jumped into the ring.

Billed as the first unified, Hadoop-native big data platform for visual analytics and business intelligence, Arcadia Enterprise aims to help business users analyze billions of data records, autoscaling to handle thousands of simultaneous queries in near real time.

Drawing insights out of big data is a pervasive challenge for companies today, largely because business users must often rely on expert help to access and analyze the data they're interested in. The skills typically necessary to work with Hadoop were recently found by Gartner to be a common sticking point.

That's where Arcadia Data hopes to come in. The startup's new enterprise platform promises an easier way to leverage the scale, data and security infrastructure of the Hadoop cluster, offering concurrent access across hundreds of users with near real-time response.

A simple visual interface provides both exploration and semantic modeling, Arcadia Data says, making insights quicker to achieve by eliminating intermediate data stack technologies and appliances such as data warehousing, OLAP servers and data marts.

Drag-and-drop tools offer access to granular path analysis, flow and funnel algorithms, behavior-based segmentation and dimension correlations through on-cluster execution, for example.

SAP, Oracle and AtScale are all among the other companies that have rolled out Hadoop-focused analytics tools in the past few months.

Beyond Hadoop, Arcadia Data also enables users to build apps across data sources including MySQL, Oracle and Teradata.

Arcadia Enterprise was first launched to a limited audience in June; early users have included P&G and HP. Also in June, Arcadia Data announced $11.5 million in Series A funding along with Arcadia Instant, a free, downloadable visual analytics tool.

Pricing information for Arcadia Enterprise was not immediately available.