This week Cloudera and Google’s new cloud platform were the biggest attractions, not just for the blogosphere but also several vendors that decided to align themselves with one or the other to promote their big data plans.

Hewlett-Packard said on Thursday that it signed an OEM agreement with Cloudera that will enable it to resell the Hadoop distributor’s Enterprise platform and bundle it with a big data appliance that is due to hit general availability sometime later this year. This  should allow HP to do some much-needed catching up.

Dell has also been in a partnership with Cloudera for over a year now, and its own big data appliance is becoming increasingly popular. Earlier this week the hardware giant  debuted a new data retention solution that extends the two companies’ relations: customers can pay a premium to have Cloudera’s management platform installed on the core solution, which in turn can be upgraded with different hardware options.

The last vendor that stepped up its Cloudera partnership this week was Pentaho. The 4.5 release of its Business Analytics software now features tighter integration with Cloudera Enterprise 4.0 and CDH4, meaning that several new features are made available to users. There are visualized interfaces and improved data manipulation that boost productivity according to Pentaho, and  data integration and task orchestration are now supported as well.

The second big name in the channel throughout the past few days was Google Cloud. Hadoop distrobution seller MapR and Talend joined the newly launched partner program for the service, followed by Jaspersoft and others.

Finally, SAP had some good news. The BI kingpin reported results for Q2 and among other things revealed that HANA generated €85 million in revenue, a number that is expected to balloon to a total of €320 million in fiscal 2012.