Hewlett-Packard Co. has deepened its partnership with Hadoop distribution maker Hortonworks by investing US$50 million in the startup, for which it gets a seat on the board.
The deal not only brings HP closer to the Hadoop community, it could also help lean CIOs to take a closer look at Hortonworks when they are searching for a Hadoop distribution to adopt.
The partnership started in 2013 when HP agreed to resell Hortonworks’ Enterprise Hadoop. Hadoop is open source framework for processing large datasets. A number of companies, including Intel, have developed Hadoop distributions. Hortonworks says its all components of its Delta Platform have been developed through the open source Apache Software Foundation and have no proprietary extensions.
HP believes that “a significant number” of Hadoop nodes are being deployed on its servers, which is why its moving closer to Hortonworks.
In addition to money, both organizations are committing engineering resources to integrate the Hortonworks’ Data Platform with HP technologies including software in its HAVEn portfolio, such as Vertica. HP will get Vertica certified as ready for YARN, the architectural center of Enterprise Hadoop.
“We are deeply committed to enabling Apache Hadoop as a comprehensive enterprise data platform delivered completely in open source as the Hortonworks Data Platform,” a Hortonworks exec said in a blog Thurdsay .” We have been 100 per cent consistent about that mission since the founding of our company, and we remain focused on enabling the ecosystem of end-users and vendors to incorporate Hadoop as a component of the modern data architecture.”
As Information Week notes, the HP investment comes just weeks afterGoogle Capital invested $80 million in Hadoop distributor MapR as part of a $110 million financing round, Intel paid US$740 million for 18 per cent stake in Cloudera and GE’s has put US$105 million investment in Pivota. Combined they show “confidence that Hadoop is here to stay as part of the enterprise data-management landscape.”