Hortonworks, a Hadoop startup that was spun off from Yahoo, has hired Mark Himelstein as its new vice president of engineering. Hortonworks is amidst some rapid expansion thanks to a couple of recent initiatives, which is why this latest addition to its management team is particularly significant.

“We believe that Mark’s presence will further accelerate Hortonworks’ technical development, enabling our engineers to continue to lead the way in contributing to Apache Hadoop projects,” said Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of Hortonworks.

Himelstein, who will be put in charge of the company’s technology development, brings 25 of experience to Hortonworks. Before he joined the Hadoop startup Himelstein served as CTO of Quantum, and was vice president of Solaris Engineering at Sun prior to that.

Hortonworks is shaking up the Hadoop ecosystem with the Hortonworks Data Platform. The new company has started out with a service vision and ended up developing its own Hadoop distribution. It’s completely open-source, and features another open-source tool – the Next Generation Resource Manager.

Hortonworks co-founder Arun Murthy said during a visit to theCube during Hadoop World 2011 that his company is looking to get half of the world’s data on Hadoop within five years. The new distribution Resource Manager will play an instrumental part of this plan. The latter is still under development, but has already been made available to limited number of users.

Hortonworks is now challenging Cloudera directly, though the latter still has the edge in the market thanks to a two year head start.  Just this month Cloudera received another $40 million in a series D round of funding.

On the other side of the Hadoop ecosystem, Revolution Analytics extended support in the latest release of its R-based analytics management suite to include Hadoop. Version 5.0 also features a number of other improvements.