Hadoop is a powerful source of adoption for #OpenStack according to Jim Walker, Director of Product Marketing at Hortonworks. He stopped by #theCUBE yesterday during our live broadcast from the fifth annual OpenStack Summit in Portland to talk with co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick about a big announcement Hortonworks had with Mirantis and Red Hat.

The announcement is that Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop, Mirantis, the largest #OpenStack systems integrator and Red Hat, Inc., a top provider of open source solutions and one the largest contributors to the most recent release of OpenStack, are working together to contribute significantly to Project Savanna under the OpenStack community guidelines. The end goal: to deliver Apache Hadoop on OpenStack.

Hortonworks is contributing significantly to the buildout of Savanna. It has a simple goal of simplifying Hadoop on OpenStack. Furrier pressed Walker a bit, but he openly admitted: Hadoop is hard to work with. There are a lot of configurations to get started and Hortonworks wants to continue to improve Hadoop into a ‘push button’ ease solution.  Hortonworks is contributing both code and expertise to OpenStack. Bring some code to the table and you’re in is how OpenStack works, and how open source communities thrive.

When asked, “why Savanna?” Walker breaks things down:

“Bringing the right people together. It just makes sense. Hadoop on OpenStack. Hortonworks end game is to make Hadoop an enterprise viable platform, and Project Savanna increases that likelihood.”

Worth noting: Furrier makes more than one mention of Hortonworks being present at OpenStack, and Cloudera noticeably not. Furrier mentioned, and I support: it’s a great go to market strategy from Hortonworks to get into the enterprise through the OpenStack community. As the two main horses in the open source Hadoop, I think it is worth mentioning that Hortonworks was unmistakably present at the OpenStack Summit this year, and Cloudera wasn’t. Is Cloudera resting on its laurels, or was the Summit not a priority this year?