Cloudera just announced the general availability of Impala 1.0, the first “production-hardened and customer validated” version of its real-time SQL-on-Hadoop solution. The firm boasts that over 40 enterprises have deployed the engine in their environments since it made its debut at last year’s Strata + Hadoop World conference.

Cloudera’s list of high-profile Impala users includes 37signals, Expedia, Six3 Systems, Stripe, and Trion Worlds. The open-source platform was just as well received in the vendor’s ecosystem: IBM, SAP, Tableau Software over half a dozen other partners certified the platform for integration with their software.

“We have seen wonderful improvements in query performance when using Impala which will make Hadoop more valuable to our customers as they adopt it broadly and give more people interactive access,” said Dan Jewett, Vice President of Product Management at Tableau Software. “We are very pleased with our experiences working with Impala and the Cloudera team, as one of the first partners to integrate with Impala.”

The latest version of Impala is freely available on Cloudera’s website. The Hadoop distributor is monetizing the solution via Enterprise Real-Time Query (RTQ), a supplementary subscription service that includes technical support and management automation advice.

The release of Impala 1.0 follows the launch of Cloudera Academic Partnership, a program that helps universities incorporate Big Data into their curriculums. California State University, Los Angeles, the Harvard Cancer Center and San Jose State are among the seven institutions that announced their participation right off the bat.

Cloudera is determined to grow its presence in academia and the open-source space, but OpenStack is apparently not a priority. The company’s absence from the OpenStack Summit took theCube host and SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier by surprise, partially because Hortonworks – one of Cloudera’s biggest competitors – was so well represented at the event.