For the past few months, there have been a lot of rumors that Yahoo will be launching a separate company that would focus on the development and commercialization of Apache Hadoop. Derrick Harris from GigaOM reports that Yahoo will likely make an official announcement tomorrow, in time for the 4th annual Hadoop Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

The Hadoop spinoff will be called Horton Works, a reference to Dr. Seuss book “Hears a Who.” It is comprised of Yahoo’s Hadoop engineers setting out to create production-ready Hadoop products. To improve the Hadoop experience, Horton Works will be incorporating the capabilities of MapReduce and include higher-level-management tools.

Earlier this year, it has been known that there was some misunderstanding between Apache devotees and Yahoo, which prompted Yahoo to discontinue its Hadoop distribution. However, Yahoo will try to have a better working relationship with Apache Hadoop with the objective of making Hadoop the leading open source platform for big data.

This move by Yahoo will make a lot of companies uneasy. Yahoo will find itself in a thick and increasing crowd of open source big data technology. One of the major players is Cloudera, which is considered as the pioneering company in Hadoop distribution, and has already invested $36 million around these efforts. A number of Hadoop distribution start-up companies like DataStax, Netapp and SnapLogic are slowly growing as well. EMC and IBM have also invested a great deal in their own Hadoop initiatives. Other Hadoop alternatives are VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Rackspace’s Openstack.

It is still very early to tell how the each company would fare in the next few months. Majority of the big data industry are composed of start-up companies and yet to earn at this point.