Hortonworks, while having been spun off from the original Hadoop initiative at Yahoo that’s driven so many of Big Data’s recent victories, is relatively new as a standalone operation.  And as several vendors and small players alike race to launch their own Hadoop distro, the competition is getting fierce.  To best position itself in the Hadoop market, Hortonworks is taking a horizontal approach, teaming with the best in the business, including Microsoft.

Hortonworks Chief Strategy Officer, Shaun Connolly stopped by theCube at Strata this week to talk Big Data, open source, and Hortonworks’ unique relationship with Microsoft, as well as implementing Hadoop, with show hosts John Furrier and Jeff Kelly (full video below).

Hortonworks’ big news at the Strata conference is its 100-percent open source Hortonworks Data Platform. The platform is reportedly the industry’s first and only Apache Hadoop distribution for both Windows and Linux, enabling organizations to run Hadoop-based solutions natively on Windows. This singular solution will provide identical user experiences and interoperability across both operating systems. With the ability to complete portability of its Hadoop applications between on-premise and cloud deployments via HDP for Windows and HDInsight Service, the announcement is being extremely well received.

According to IDC, Windows Server owned 73 percent of the market in 2012, so it’s not  a bad dance partner to have.  And Connolly believes that Microsoft has shown significant effort to play and play well in the open source space. When asked to elaborate on Hortonworks’ partnership with Microsoft, Connolly points to “actions – they’ve put a lot of code into Apache, contributing high value in the community…really earning their stripes…offering enterprise thought leadership.” Jeff Kelly of Wikibon chimed in to further comment on Microsoft’s commitment to open source, “They killed their own internal Big Data to pick up Hadoop.”

Venders will continue to evolve. The platforms they support and create will evolve as well. Connolly sees there being 3 horseman: mobile, cloud, and big data. He suggested that as a customer, scale back and ask, what is really important to you as a business? When analyzing new solutions focus on three key areas:

1. Is it enterprise ready?
2. Is the deployment approachable, meaning transition-ready?
3. Is it economical – price makes sense (saves money)?

Big Data is walking in the front door. The noise of service offerings to analyze and house Big Data is loud. There are two approaches to attack the market that vendors use:

• horizontally, build out a unified platform (best of bread approach)
• fracture the market, get a chunk of what you fractured

Hortonworks practices the horizontal approach, and has proved to be the ace in its strong suit. When probed about EMC Greenplum’s aggressive Hadoop launch at Strata, Connolly replied, “I think their approach is not being as respectful to the open source community as possible.”  Making friends in a competitive marketplace isn’t easy. But Hortonworks has continued to align itself with the “best in breed,” while making a strong case for its solutions.

See the full segment below: