Avert your eyes! Hortonworks mates Hadoop beast with SAS

New pact to mesh the elephant with data giant

Hadoop company Hortonworks is teaming up with SAS on a strategic partnership to integrate its analytics platform with SAS's suite of data technologies.

The alliance was announced on Friday and will give enterprises a "SAS/ACCESS" interface into the Hortonworks Data Platform, which will let them run tools such as Visual Analytics alongside Hadoop.

Both companies will jointly invest in research and development, marketing, and customer support around the programs as well, they said.

This partnership follows a similar one by Hortonworks with the other European data giant SAP, which was announced a month ago.

Hortonworks told us in September it was pursuing partnerships with major computer hardware makers and systems integrators, and didn't bat us down when we suggested the company could be going after Dell, HP, Accenture, CapGemini, and others.

Hortonworks and Cloudera are considered joint leaders of the Hadoop ecosystem, with each company taking a different tactic with how it pursues business.

Cloudera produces proprietary extensions on top of its Hadoop platform, while Hortonworks relies on an entirely open-source model. Both companies have strong expertise in the system with much of Yahoo!'s original Hadoop development team found at Hortonworks, and the co-creator of Hadoop Doug Cutting is working as the chief architect at Cloudera.

"The expanded integration of SAS with Hortonworks Data Platform provides a simple way for customers to broaden their analytic operations across new data sets that can drive smarter business decisions," Hortonworks' corporate strategy veep Shaun Connolly said in a canned statement. "Our alliance with SAS extends the availability of 100 pe rcent open-source Apache Hadoop and makes it easy for SAS customers to embrace Hadoop as a core component of their data architecture."

Early Hadoop pioneer Eric Baldeschwieler left Hortonworks in August, leading some to question whether the company was still capable of advancing the Hadoop platform. Now, two and a half months later, the company is still one of the largest code committers for the technology. ®