Hadoop isn’t optional for today’s enterprises—that much is clear. But as companies race to get control over the significantly growing volumes of unstructured data in their organizations, they’ve been less certain about the right way to put Hadoop to work in their environment.
We’ve already seen a variety of wrong approaches with proprietary extensions that limit innovation, fragment architectures and trade openness for vendor lock-in. Now a new consensus is forming around an emerging category that drives truly transformational outcomes: Open Enterprise Hadoop.
Hortonworks pioneered this category, and the Global 5000 is rapidly adopting its unique approach. You can see this momentum in our Hortonworks Q1 earnings announcement. We were able to achieve 200 percent growth in customers and 167 percent growth in GAAP revenue.
In fact, Hortonworks’ innovative approach to this market has been noticed by more than just the industry analyst community. Michal Katz from RBC notes in her blog that Hortonworks’ CEO Rob Bearden is joining the select top industry leaders to transform the industry with next generation solutions.
Here’s why so many organizational leaders are making Open Enterprise Hadoop the foundation of their big data strategy.
Open Enterprise Hadoop takes direct aim at those shortcomings that hampered previous approaches to Hadoop in the enterprise. Those earlier attempts typically relied on proprietary extensions of early Hadoop projects, a branching approach that sealed them off from subsequent innovations, locked them into vendor-specific analytics, and often undermined integration with YARN, the open data operating system.
By taking that path, those Hadoop vendors surrendered much of the rapid innovation that comes from open source development, making the platform feel all too much like the legacy technologies that it was supposed to surpass.
Open Enterprise Hadoop solutions keep Hadoop true to its open source heritage—while also adding crucial innovations to meet demanding enterprise requirements.
Instead of creating their own proprietary extensions, vendors in this category rely solely on open source components and on the open community. They harness the powerful processes governed by the Apache Software Foundation and its enterprise-savvy committers—including more than 100 at Hortonworks alone (which employs the most Hadoop committers in the industry).
As a result of this very intentional strategy, Open Enterprise Hadoop solutions:
- Leverage the full power of open source development. Open Enterprise Hadoop solutions remain “on-the-trunk,” so enterprises benefit from the latest community innovations as soon as they become available.
- Consolidate data silos. Open Enterprise Hadoop requires that all Hadoop ecosystem projects leverage the Apache Hadoop YARN data operating system. This makes it possible for organizations to access a centralized “data lake” via multiple heterogeneous access methods, support many different users at once, and scale to deployments managing petabytes of data. Open Enterprise Hadoop also ensures full interoperability beyond the Hadoop core through the promotion of open standards for the broad technology ecosystem.
- Provide robust operations, security, and governance capabilities. Open Enterprise Hadoop vendors make the platform ready to meet those enterprise standards through the work of project committers who combine enterprise savvy with a commitment to open source principles and processes.
The latest version of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) will be introduced this month, and it illustrates some major advances only possible with this approach of harnessing the power of the community. Those advances in HDP 2.3 include:
- A breakthrough user experience. Dramatic reductions in administrative complexity and a vastly improved user experience speed time to value. Fast setup, a streamlined configurations, and simple cluster formation help you get the platform up and running quickly, while real-time dashboards make it easier to maximize cluster health.
- Enhanced security and governance. HDP 2.3 extends our data governance initiative with Apache Atlas. IT can use a single administrative console to set security policy across the entire cluster. Complete capabilities for authentication, authorization, and auditing support full access control and reporting. HDP can encrypt data at rest and in motion.
- Proactive support. Hortonworks frees more finite engineering resources from maintaining the internals of the data platform. While you can still self-support HDP, we provide subscriptions for 24 x 7 support along with patches, updates, and other fixes to keep your critical enterprise workloads running.
You can learn more about what’s in HDP 2.3 by reading Tim Hall’s post from earlier today.
What does all this mean to you? As the industry moves toward open Hadoop solutions, Hortonworks is driving the Open Enterprise Hadoop category to deliver transformational outcomes for today’s businesses.
We’re working closely with our 437 customers—and counting—to understand the needs of enterprises across all industries, and then we leverage the power of our leadership in the open source community to innovate the technology according to those priorities. And as a community, we do it faster than any single vendor ever could.
And we’re just getting started. You’ll be hearing a lot more about Open Enterprise Hadoop in the months ahead—and you’ll like what you hear.
Learn More
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What’s New in HDP 2.3
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What’s SmartSense
- What’s Open Enterprise Hadoop
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Read HDP 2.3 Announcement
About the Author
Matthew Morgan is the vice president of global product marketing for Hortonworks. In this role, he leads Hortonworks product marketing, vertical solutions marketing, and worldwide sales enablement. His background includes twenty years in enterprise software, including leading worldwide product marketing organizations for Citrix, HP Software, Mercury Interactive, and Blueprint. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn or visit his personal blog
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