The team behind the Apache Zeppelin open-source notebook for big data analytics visualization has renamed itself ZEPL and announced $4.1M in Series A funding.

ZEPL, which swears a certain professional football organization had nothing to do with it ditching its former name (NFLabs), is one of numerous companies smelling blood in the water around Tableau, the $3.5 billion business intelligence and analytics software vendor that has stumbled financially in recent quarters and seen its stock price plummet accordingly. The pitch from ZEPL entering my email inbox read: "Is Open Source project eating Tableau's lunch?"

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And that came shortly after rascally private upstart Domo did its best party pooping at Tableau's big customer and partner conference last month via an "Escape Tableau hell" party and campaign.

Tableau's not taking all this quietly, having recently announced new offerings and buddied up with Amazon Web Services via a public cloud partnership.

But ZEPL is going to give Tableau its best shot. Backed by Vertex Ventures and others in its Series A funding round, the San Francisco startup aims to help enterprises eliminate data analytics silos by providing data scientists, business analysts and others with tools that share a common interface and that support modern frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra and MongoDB.

ZEPL is among a slew of open-source oriented startups attracting venture funding this year. Other recent ones include Heptio (Kubernetes container tech) and Redis Labs (in-memory data structure server).