Cloudera, a provides of enterprise software and services for Hadoop, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have announced a new joint development and licensing agreement. HP will resell Cloudera’s Enterprise platform, and the companies are planning to release a Hadoop appliance. The appliance, planned for release by the end of the year, will include HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop preinstalled.

HP has said it is dedicated to expanding its presence in the big data space. The two companies already had a partnership, but this agreement should make it easier for HP and Cloudera customers to setup Hadoop clusters. The new deal simplifies the purchasing process for HP customers by allowing customers to purchase everything they need to create a Hadoop cluster from a single vendor. HP is just selling the Hadoop solutions, it also providing architectural guidance. The company announced its Hadoop for Cloudera reference architecture it announced in June.

Given all the options for leveraging Hadoop in the enterprise, HP is counting on the ability to integrate products from its massive portfolio like Vertica for analytics and Autonomy for search to attract customers. Additionally, HP has also established relationships with other players in the big data space like MapR. The approach fits well with the converged infrastructure strategy  HP is heavily promoting across the company.

HP’s expanded relationship with Cloudera further strengthens its leadership position in the Hadoop market. Cloudera was one the first companies to offer commercial Hadoop products and services. Cloudera provides its own enterprise Hadoop distribution, a management platform, professional services and training for Hadoop, and for a long time was the only choice for commercial Hadoop support. In addition, Cloudera has partnered with a long list vendors like IBM, Dell, MicrStrategy, Cisco and many more. Even HP’s nemesis Oracle also selected Cloudera to provide the Hadoop implementation for its Big Data Appliance.

Cloudera isn’t the only company busy partnering. The Hadoop market is evolving so quickly, each week someone announces a new partnership, company or product. In a few years, the market will likely look much different when the dust from the countless partnerships and acquisitions settle.