News

Cloudera Joins Hortonworks as Microsoft Azure Big Data Option

• By David Ramel
• October 23, 2014

Just five days after last week's Microsoft Azure certification of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), rival enterprise Hadoop vendor Cloudera Inc. followed suit with Azure certification for its Cloudera Enterprise offering.

"As a result of this certification, organizations will be able to launch a Cloudera Enterprise cluster from the Azure Marketplace starting Oct. 28," Microsoft said in a blog post. "Initially, this will be an evaluation cluster with access to MapReduce, HDFS and Hive. At the end of this year when Cloudera 5.3 releases, customers will be able to leverage the power of the full Cloudera Enterprise distribution including HBase, Impala, Search and Spark."

The Azure certifications give Microsoft cloud customers more Big Data options and illustrate the continuing moves and counter-moves by leading vendors of Hadoop-based enterprise distributions as they trade product, acquisition and partnership announcements.

Or, in the words of Virginia Backaitis on CMSWire, "Anyone that Hortonworks gets into bed with, Cloudera snuggles up to next." CMSWire noted that Cloudera recently teamed up with Teradata, an established partner of Hortonworks Inc.

Also, as reported here in June, less than three weeks after Hortonworks acquired security company XA Secure, Cloudera acquired Gazzang Inc., a 4-year-old security company headquartered in Austin, Texas.

And in its new era of openness, interoperability and more customer alternatives, Microsoft has shown it isn't playing any favorites in the Big Data space, despite its longtime partnership with Hortonworks, which collaborated with the Redmond software giant on its cloud-based Hadoop service, HDInsight, and earlier developed HDP for Windows for on-premises implementations.

"Hortonworks is a key partner of Microsoft and we are pleased to be Hortonworks' preferred cloud provider," said Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie following the Hortonworks deal. "With the availability of HDP as an Azure Certified virtual machine [VM], customers have more options to run their Big Data workloads whether it be as a hosted VM, a managed service, on-premises or in hybrid scenarios."

"Microsoft and Cloudera are collaborating to help customers realize Big Data insights with the cloud," Guthrie said in the Cloudera announcement. "Now Azure customers can deploy Cloudera Enterprise with a few clicks, visualize their data with Microsoft Power BI and gain insights to transform their business -- all within minutes."

• Deploy Cloudera directly from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Import data into Cloudera from SQL Server.
• Use Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 for self-service business intelligence.
• Use Azure Machine Learning for cloud-based predictive analytics.

Microsoft said it's also working with Cloudera for more integration with Analytics Platform System, SQL Server, Power BI and Azure Machine Learning.