Just weeks after raising new capital via its IPO, Hortonworks extended the number of technology certifications it provides as part of an effort to make it simpler to integrate its distribution of Hadoop with a wider variety of IT environments.
The company aims to ensure that products and technologies awarded the new certifications—which include HDP Operations Ready, iHDP Security Ready and HDP Governance Ready—can be easily integrated with the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), said John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing.
“Hadoop is made up of dozens of open-source projects,” said Kreisa. “The certifications identify partners that we’ve developed a deep engineering relationship with.”
To minimize that complexity, the HDP Operations Ready certification covers using the Apache Ambari project software to connect HDP to an enterprise management system, integrating Ambari-managed Hadoop components using Ambari Stacks, or providing tools using Ambari Views.
HDP Security Ready covers the ability to deploy Kerberos authentication software within an HDP cluster or integrate with Apache Knox gateway and Apache Ranger software to provide security integration and centralized management.
HDP Governance Ready covers data that is certified to be integrated with HDP using automated data pipelines using the Apache Falcon data workflow engine.
Via existing alliances with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, SAP and others, Hortonworks has now developed hundreds of certifications for various classes of technologies that IT organizations need to integrate with HDP, Kreisa siad. From a solutions provider perspective, those certifications assure them that integration of HDP with those offerings will be seamless.
In a study released earlier this year, Allied Market Research valued the Hadoop market at $1.5 billion in 2012 and projected that it will reach $50.2 billion by 2020.
Hortonworks in November became the first Hadoop company to file for an IPO, ahead of competitors MapR and Cloudera, according to Bloomberg. The offering raised approximately $100 million for Hortonworks, and the IPO price valued the company at about 60 times sales for its 2013 fiscal year, which ended in April 2013, Bloomberg reported.
Hortonworks is locked in a battle with other Hadoop providers to offer the foundation for big data lakes and hubs that IT organizations are deploying to capture all the raw data their organizations generate. Once established, those organizations are then integrating those big data sources with existing data warehouses or building new classes of analytics applications that run directly on top of Hadoop.
In either scenario, Hadoop is creating a significant opportunity for solution providers in the channel, not only because of the complexity involved in deploying Hadoop, but also due to a general shortage of big data skills.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.