With its new partner certification program, Cloudera is trying to foster a large and thriving Hadoop ecosystem with itself at the center.

A certification from Cloudera means that the hardware or software in question has been tested and validated to work with Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop.

The certification program is mutually beneficial to Cloudera and its partners, as I see it.

For Cloudera, certified partners like Dell lend it a level of credibility it needs to spur adoption among large enterprises wary of doing business with a little-known start-up. Oh, my new Dell server has a Cloudera certification sticker on it, notices a CIO. If Dell works with Cloudera, the company must be solid.

Each new certification also serves a form of free advertising for Cloudera. The more certifications it bestows, the more interest from partner customers Cloudera will get.

Services Angle

As I’ve written before, services are going to play a huge role in the development of Hadoop from a niche open source framework to a widely-adopted, enterprise-ready technology. Deploying, tuning and managing Hadoop is a complex affair. With a dearth of qualified developers and data scientists on the job market, services providers are needed to fill the void.

Expect to see services vendors among the first-batch of Cloudera-certified partners.

Check out this clip of Wikibon’s Stu Miniman and I discussing the role of services providers as part of our analysis of the new Cloudera partner program: