Making Hadoop mainstream, and enabling customers to pull Hadoop data to use with familiar tools — these are the main goals of the Microsoft-Hortonworks partnership. Eron Kelly, General Manager of SQL Server Marketing at Microsoft, and John Kreisa, VP of strategic Marketing for Hortonworks, explained this successful collaboration to theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Kelly, live at the Hadoop Summit this week.

Explaining their partnership selection, Kelly said “we looked at datascaping, it was evolving. Being able to use Windows tools to access it was important,” as well as using Windows tools in the cloud, going on to say “we wanted it to not be proprietary. That’s why we also invested back into community.”

Microsoft had their competing Big Data framework, but chose to put everything into Hadoop, Kelly explained, saying, “between proprietary or embracing Hadoop, we went with Hadoop and partnered with Hortonworks.” This way, “a lot more people would be able to use it,” he furthered.

For Microsoft it was very important that every Excel user on the planet could pull information from Hadoop. “Going our own way would have made it a lot harder,” said Kelly. “The partnership worked.”

“It’s been a great partnership,” Kreisa agreed. “At this state, it is one of our longest partnerships, and the deepest we’ve had.” For Hadoop to be successful, you have to enable customers to access their traditional tools, and “that is why this partnership is so important,” he added.

“It’s super important for us to enable the usage of Hadoop in the mode and the toolage they have,” Kreisa said. Commenting on the Sting Initiative, he said it was a 13 month project to make Hive the de facto engine inside of Hadoop. To achieve that, the aim was to make improvements across the board to make it much faster, enhancing what it provided to end users. In his opinion, Sting was a successful initiative.

“It’s been the core of our strategy, how do we take customers that are familiar to certain tools and allow them to have access to data available on Hadoop,” Kelly said. Microsoft contributed 10,000 engineering hours since we partnering with Hortonworks to achieve that goal, to help bring Hadoop and make it more mainstream.

Fitting Hadoop into the Microsoft ecosystem

Asked how Hadoop fitted with the rest of the Microsoft portfolio of data management technology, Kelly said, “we think of it as a great complement to the technologies” in the portfolio. Power BI, Excel, the analytics layer, the SQL server — all of these are complemented by adding Hadoop to the portfolio. “In most cases we see it as a complement, a complementary installation,” Kelly explained. “For the most part, our sellers look at this as an augment or an add on to the deal, rather than a replacement.”

Exemplifying use cases for their partnership, Kelly mentioned Virginia Tech, which was “incredibly exciting when you think of the statistics. Hadoop and this access to low cost computing storage accelerated their ability to come up with cures for cancer.” Before, they could sequence one genome, now they do a hundred in a day.