Cloudera picked up a new partner today, adding Revolution Analytics to its growing ecosystem.  Revolution a startup that came out of stealth in May of last year, developing solutions based on the open R statistical analysis programming language.  Today the company announced that it will integrate Cloudera’s Distribution with Apache Hadoop (CDH3) with its Revolution R Enterprise platform to create a joint offer called “RevoConnectR for Apache Hadoop.”

The product is meant to enable R developers to access Hadoop data stores and write MapReduce jobs directly with R. This can open up Hadoop, and specifically Cloudera’s distribution to a whole new audience.  Ed Albanese, head of business development at Cloudera elaborated on this angle:

“This solution, which combines the Cloudera Distribution including Apache Hadoop with Revolution Analytics Enterprise R, is about democratizing access to technologies uniquely capable of performing analysis on these new classes of data.”

Partnerships are key in open source, helping the industry determine its path and monetization structure.  Cloudera’s playing as big a part as it can.  In August the firm rolled out a certification program for hardware and software partners in an effort to increase the credibility of its product with backing from  more high profile partners and resellers (such as Dell for example).  Jeff Kelly delves deeper into its partnerships strategy here.

R Analytics is a big pusher of data analytics, recognizing a few key areas the industry needs to grow.  The company hopes to address some pain points the industry is currently dealing with, while also offering an innovative product that is strongly rooted in its community.  Additional partnerships with the likes of Cloudera extend Revolution’s reach, and provides it a new platform to leverage.  R Analytics is out to solve a big problem in big data, and will need all the support it can get.