Pivotal Software, Inc. said Monday that it will collaborate with Hortonworks, Inc. on the open source Apache Ambari project. Hortonworks currently uses Ambari for Hadoop monitoring and management. Other contributors to Apache Ambari include Red Hat Inc. and IBM.

Pivotal, which is part of EMC’s federation around PaaS, Big Data analytics and application development., plans to contribute to Ambari while also continuing to develop its own Pivotal Command Center, offering one as an alternative to the other for its customers. Pivotal’s own Pivotal HD Hadoop distribution includes proprietary extensions, and the company indicated that it will add support for those extensions to Apache Ambari.

Pivotal deal won’t change Hortonworks’ relationship with HP

Collaboration is common in the open source community, even among companies that compete in other areas. In this case, Pivotal is a spin-out and joint venture of EMC and VMware, while Hortonworks just received $50 million in funding from Hewlett-Packard Co. In theory, this puts both companies in the position of seeding support from competing benefactors while also building their own alliances. But according to Michael Cucchi, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pivotal, that position is exactly where his company wants to be.

“Pivotal will continue to support and accelerate our contributions to the Hadoop ecosystem, as our enterprise distribution is based completely on the Apache Hadoop core,” Cucchi added in an email statement. “In parallel, we will continue to innovate on differentiated modules that are complementary to Hadoop. We are in a fast-growing market that receives a lot of attention. The HP investment in Hortonworks does not change any of our perspective on the market or plans for our Hadoop offerings.”

Hortonworks’ Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy echoed those sentiments. “You don’t make a platform like Hadoop easy to use and enterprise-grade by innovating alone or in a vacuum. You do it by working with the broader ecosystem. Collaborating in the open with Pivotal to further invest in Apache Ambari as the standard management tool for Hadoop will benefit the entire Hadoop community,” he said via email.

Connolly also said his company wants to see development and collaboration with Hadoop and Ambari expand even further . “Pivotal’s open source track record and breadth of skills will go a long way toward helping enterprises to be successful more quickly with Hadoop,” he said.

Governance in open source: flexibility is key

Governance of the Apache Ambari project is under the control of The Apache Software Foundation, which is intended to enable balanced open source development without one company’s interests overriding another’s. This gives open source a more flexible development environment, according to Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT, Inc.

“The nature of collaborative IT relationships is pretty flexible, especially in areas that are in an early evolutionary state,” he explained in an email statement.

“This is a case where the pair has more to gain by collaborating than working separately,” King said. “HP doesn’t stand to lose anything as a result, and improved orchestration should heighten the quality of Hortonworks’ solutions and improve the value of HP’s $50 million investment. Overall, I consider this a win/win for everyone.”

In a situation where everyone wins, that includes the customers who stand to gain more options and higher quality solutions for Hadoop management in the future.