The Importance of the Teradata & Hortonworks Partnership

Hortonworks and Teradata announced a strategic relationship today that includes joint go-to-market and development work to more closely integrate Hortonworks Data Platform with the Teradata Analytical Ecosystem. I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight this important partnership and share my thoughts on why this is an important milestone for Hortonworks and the larger Apache Hadoop community.

As somebody that has been heavily involved in the development of Apache Hadoop for six years and counting, it’s personally exciting to see Hadoop entering a new phase of adoption. Hadoop has been heavily used in organizations such as Yahoo!, Facebook, Linked In and other large web properties since 2006. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a surge in the number of organizations testing Hadoop in proof-of-concept or pilot projects but it hasn’t yet reached massive adoption in production in the enterprise.

The Hortonworks team, along with many others in the community, has been working hard to harden the platform so that it can be used as the stable, enterprise-ready big data platform by every organization. However, there are two important challenges that need to be addressed before broad enterprise adoption can occur:

• Understanding the right use cases in which to utilize Apache Hadoop.
• Integrating Apache Hadoop with existing data architectures in an appropriate manner to get better value from existing investments.

My sense of excitement about the Teradata/Hortonworks partnership is amplified by the fact that it addresses these two core challenges for Apache Hadoop:

• We will be rolling out a reference architecture that provides guidance to enterprises that want to understand the best use cases for which to apply Hadoop. As part of that, we will be helping Teradata customers use Hadoop in conjunction with their Teradata and Teradata Aster analytic data solutions investments.
• We will also be working closely with the Teradata engineering teams on jointly engineered solutions that optimize the integration points with Apache Hadoop.

From an Apache Hadoop community perspective, this is important because it provides a clear path for Apache Hadoop to become increasingly adopted in existing data architectures. When combined with the significant advancements in Apache Hadoop such as NextGen MapReduce, HDFS Federation, HA NameNode, performance enhancements, etc., I’ve never been more excited about the future of Apache Hadoop.

From a Hortonworks perspective, I’m pleased that key players like Teradata have embraced Hortonworks’ deep domain expertise to build jointly engineered solutions. I’m also pleased that they chose Hortonworks because of our absolute commitment to advancing Apache Hadoop development as well as to bring to market 100% open products developed under the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation using the Apache Software License (v2). This announcement is a win not only for Teradata and Hortonworks customers but also for Apache Hadoop and open source in general.

~Arun C. Murthy