Cloudera’s been on a tear lately, launching a new Enterprise program, gaining support from some influential partners including Dell, and readily establishing its leadership position within the  open cloud industry.  Today’s news comes as a celebration of all Cloudera’s done up to now, extending its principles and growth efforts to the next level.  A leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, Cloudera is now unveiling a new program designed to support the booming ecosystem around the open cloud, spanning vendors, resellers, service providers and inventors that make up this still exploratory space.

Called the Cloudera Connect Partner Program, it’s a milestone for the company as it imprints its extensive network into the ever-evolving story of the cloud.  For the Hadoop community in particular, this is an opportunity for Cloudera to further entrench its own lessons and goals as it moves forward as a business.  The new partner program makes available a wealth of resources from Cloudera, but moves beyond their specific contributions to include other commercial Hadoop providers, vendors and everyone in between.  It’s a knowledge base of developer tools, experiences and solutions, all based on the collective goals around building out Hadoop, a platform that continues to gain support and standardization amongst industry greats.

The program itself is a nod to Cloudera’s own accomplishments, marking it as the first offering of its kind.  “Here you can learn about third party technology from vendors that compete viciously with each other, telling their stories about how they work around Hadoop,” explains Ed Albanese, lead business development for Cloudera.  “This doesn’t exist anywhere else.  We’re trying to create a huge ecosystem of Hadoop vendors that have been successful, on behalf of our customers and the Hadoop community.”

Some highlights of the program include a certification suite for Apache Hadoop, marking another industry first.  It enables vendors to test and validate hardware and software for supportable operation within an Apache Hadoop cluster.  The new Partner Portal helps existing partners more speedily go from “zero to Hadoop,” with access to free technical training, sales enablement tools and marketing collateral.

There’s also the Partner Solution Spotlight, which showcases Apache Hadoop-based offerings from vendors across the ecosystem.  Partners also gain access to online training, seminars and engineering support, along with discounts, marketing materials and a Lead Registration program to expedite partner relationships within the ecosystem.

So what does Cloudera gain from giving so much information away, all the while humming to a round of Kumbaya?  The program is certainly an attractive lure for new clients, but also provides a launchpad for anyone contributing or looking to contribute to the Hadoop ecosystem.  Centering a knowledge base around Hadoop certainly makes Cloudera one puff-chested industry player.

“This is really in the spirit of our investment–in services and information.  We create virtual links between Apache.org and inventors,”  Albanese goes on.  “We work hand-in-hand with Apache, but also offer open access to our tools, people and products.  The more open we are, the more revenue we create.  We recognize how important it is to make sure that technology works with a wide variety of vendors.  We’ve seen time and again that they choose Hadoop because they want choice.  And that’s what our partner program is about.”

Cloudera has been building its own business around two main products:  the company has a team of engineers that work at Apache.org, but they also have a second team that sits at Cloudera and packages those solutions.  From there Cloudera Enterprise includes the support and management framework that sits on top of that.  It’s Apache at the core, but Cloudera’s making it simpler for customers to manage the cluster.

All this open talk from cloud companies can start to sound familiar after a while–others are taking similar approaches to their open cloud efforts, from a business and support perspective.  OpenStack is one such company working at a different level of cloud management, building out a great deal of what RackSpace has put its early efforts into.  Both companies adhere to a strong set of principles guiding their open standards and practices, gaining traction and support from a steadily growing partner program for a widening understanding of how these cloud environments will play out in the future of enterprise.

I asked what Cloudera hopes to see emerge from its new Partner Program, considering this is the onset of another chapter in the company’s book.  Albanese’s response:

“We want to promote and make sure that customers and vendors alike get started in the right way towards success.  The most important thing when building around Hadoop is having the right tools and working in a consistent manner…and laying the right foundation.”