Hadoop heavyweight Cloudera Inc. has just signed on with EMC Corp.’s Technology Connect partner program, which means that EMC customers can now license Cloudera Enterprise directly from the storage giant and its reseller partners.

The move means that EMC customers now have a direct path to implement an “in-place” approach to data analytics, avoiding the time consuming mess of replicating data across separate silos, while taking advantage of Cloudera’s enterprise capabilities.

Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing of the Emerging Technologies Division at EMC, noted that the scope and mission of Hadoop has expanded rapidly. No longer is it simply used to capture and transform data from various sources, it’s now a “power-house” for analytic workloads, he said in a statement.

“Thousands of EMC Isilon customers already have a data lake. Now with the jointly certified Cloudera-on-Isilon solution, they have an engine to do even more complex data analysis,” Grocott said. “We’re giving customers a reliable foundation for critical business processes that delivers a key foundational element of EMC’s big data strategy.”

Cloudera’s certification and support for Impala means that organizations will be able to query data that resides inside Isilon’s storage. This can bring huge advantages to an array of companies, EMC said. For example, financial firms will be able to use Hadoop to build critical risk models, while healthcare companies can leverage the platform to reduce costs and improve patient care.

Andres Rodriguez, CEO of enterprise storage firm Nasuni Inc., told CRN the move makes sense for EMC, noting that its customers want more than just storage – they want the sophisticated analytics tools to drive business outcomes too.

“I think EMC is reacting well, and for partners, this is a no-brainer. It’s a great move,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez also said it’s a good move for EMC’s partners who want to sell Cloudera atop of Isilon.

“It’s great for the channel, because you can very easily sell this on top of Isilon,” Rodriguez told CRN. “It’s very difficult to move massive amounts of data to the public cloud. It’s much easier to move compute much closer to the data than it is to move the data anywhere.”

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