Hortonworks and Pivotal Provide Details on Deepening Partnership

As reported here earlier this week, the Hortonworks' Hadoop Summit has been underway in Dublin, Ireland, and one of the biggest pieces of news there was that Pivotal, already a player in the Hadoop distribution arena, will be reselling Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is Hortonworks' Hadoop platform. A corollary piece of news is that Pivotal is also shifting from focusing on its own distribution to the Hortonworks platform.

The two companies are out with more details on the arrangement.

"This strategic relationship brings together Hortonworks' expertise and support for data management and processing with Pivotal's top analytics engine for Apache Hadoop," the companies announced. Building on their previously announced alliance, the expanded Hortonworks/Pivotal relationship includes the following:

Pivotal will standardize on Pivotal HDP, support subscription software that is 100% identical to the Hortonworks Data Platform. With the introduction of Pivotal HDP, customers will get access to the rich data security, governance and operations functionality provided by HDP. Hortonworks and Pivotal are jointly going to market with an upgrade program for existing PHD customers to take advantage of HDP.

Hortonworks will offer professional customer support and professional implementation services for Hortonworks HDB powered by Apache HAWQ. Hortonworks HDB is support subscription software that is 100% identical to Pivotal HDB and provides native SQL support on Hadoop. Hortonworks HDB is an add-on support subscription to HDP and will be available in Q2 2016.

"Through this expanded partnership, customers will now benefit from the deep expertise of both companies in delivering enterprise-ready open source software for production environments at scale for the most demanding workloads," said Herb Cunitz, president, Hortonworks. "Hortonworks and Pivotal are aligned in the belief that the best way to deliver infrastructure platform technology today is to eliminate fragmentation and do it completely in open source."

 "This collaboration brings to life our shared belief in an open source approach and the pervasive adoption of enterprise-ready modern data platforms," said Leo Spiegel, senior vice president, corporate development and strategy, Pivotal. "Together, Pivotal and Hortonworks have a unified approach via the ODPi Core which removes key barriers to the widespread enterprise adoption of Hadoop and modern big data applications."

Both Hortonworks and Pivotal are founding members of the ODPi, an open source consortium that brings industry leaders, enterprises, service providers and independent software vendors together to accelerate the open ecosystem of big data solutions through the ODPi Core.

Cloudera Inc., MapR Technologies Inc., IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are among companies also continuing to offer Hadoop distributions, but we are seeing market consolidation, as evidenced by Pivotal's move.