EMC Makes Hortonworks A Select Partner In Another Big Data Market Move

Closely following its move to make Cloudera a member of its Tech Connect program, EMC has made Hortonworks a Select Partner, giving the storage giant another avenue into the burgeoning big data market.

Making Hortonworks, which was recognized last month as one of CRN's Emerging Vendors, a Select Partner is an expansion of an existing relationship between EMC and the open source Hadoop data platform developer.

It means EMC can now resell -- either direct or through channel partners -- the Hortonworks Data Platform, which is certified to run on EMC's Isilon big data storage products and "enterprise ready" EMC said in a recent blog post.

[Related: Cloudera Joins EMC Tech Connect Program In Move Praised As 'No-Brainer' For Partners]

Michael Thomaschewski, director of infrastructure at Calgary, Alberta-based EMC partner Long View Systems, told CRN that closer integration between EMC and Hortonworks, as well as Cloudera, could be an important step toward helping customers successfully adopt big data solutions.

"Big data has had its challenges," Thomaschewski said. "Most clients have evaluated solutions, but most are still struggling. This could be what those struggling clients need to get past the adoption hurdle. This will hopefully provide clarity and direction so that clients can more easily adopt big data solutions."

EMC is certainly enthusiastic about its relationship with Hortonworks and other companies with which it has made software partnership investments. The company said partnerships like those with Hortonworks and Cloudera give users that want to roll out an analytics application for their business a more resilient, more cost-efficient and more easily managed infrastructure.

Ryan Peterson, chief solutions strategist at EMC, said in a recent blog post that the Hortonworks partnership comes at the right time to capitalize both on the growing amount of data enterprises produce and the desire to analyze it in increasingly complex ways.

Isilon has been successful, he said, but EMC needs to pair with a distributed computing platform in order to "give customers the ability to process data to find new insights."

"Looking at things in a practical manner, we’ve always known that combining two sets of data can provide incredible results," Peterson said. "Take, for example, the combination of a customer list, with customer orders and with inventory data. But people and things have started creating new data in new places -- whether it be from social data containing customer sentiment or sensors collecting temperatures, we now have data sets that grow well beyond those tables of small data sets."

In late July, big data management firm Cloudera joined the EMC Technology Connect business partner program, which allows EMC customers to license Cloudera Enterprise through EMC and its reseller partners for largely the same reasons.

The Cloudera partnership, EMC said, is a response to the expanding role Hadoop is playing in complex data analysis, and it gives customers Hadoop capabilities while allowing them to quickly implement data analysis and avoid replication of data across silos in a "Cloudera-on-Isilon solution."

PUBLISHED AUG. 10, 2015