With its new partner certification program, Cloudera is trying to foster a large and thriving Hadoop ecosystem with itself at the center.
A certification from Cloudera means that the hardware or software in question has been tested and validated to work with Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop.
The certification program is mutually beneficial to Cloudera and its partners, as I see it.
For Cloudera, certified partners like Dell lend it a level of credibility it needs to spur adoption among large enterprises wary of doing business with a little-known start-up. Oh, my new Dell server has a Cloudera certification sticker on it, notices a CIO. If Dell works with Cloudera, the company must be solid.
Each new certification also serves a form of free advertising for Cloudera. The more certifications it bestows, the more interest from partner customers Cloudera will get.
Services Angle
As I’ve written before, services are going to play a huge role in the development of Hadoop from a niche open source framework to a widely-adopted, enterprise-ready technology. Deploying, tuning and managing Hadoop is a complex affair. With a dearth of qualified developers and data scientists on the job market, services providers are needed to fill the void.
Expect to see services vendors among the first-batch of Cloudera-certified partners.
Check out this clip of Wikibon’s Stu Miniman and I discussing the role of services providers as part of our analysis of the new Cloudera partner program:
[...] Due to this, eduction services to help implement Hadoop play a big part in the business models for Cloudera and newcomers like the Yahoo spinoff – [...]
[...] For Cloudera, a business focused entirely on Hadoop deployment for the enterprise, there’s two areas the company is looking at, starting with the scalability of people. “Hadoop is good at scaling processing, but how can we get IT admin to manage 10k nodes?” Awadallah asks. “Cloudera enables one IT manager to scale this. We launched the Cloudera CMS Express, which brings down the level of Hadoop installation…we want to make sure they can use Hadoop with the existing infrastructure they have already.” [...]
[...] announced its partner certification program back in August. Read about it here and listen to Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman and I discuss it [...]
[...] announced a partner acceptance module behind in August. Read about it here and listen to Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman and we plead it [...]
[...] Hadoop is a top priority for his company over the next year. Indeed, Cloudera has inked a number of partnerships with analytics vendors recently with the aim of optimizing the analytics layer sitting on top of [...]