Microsoft and Hortonworks are bringing Hadoop to a billion users. The Big Data startup announced this week that the latest version of its open source Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) has been made available for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012. HDP 1.3 is the first Hadoop distribution to have been certified for use in Windows environments.

HDP 1.3 for Windows includes HBase 0.94.6.1, Flume 1.3.1, ZooKeeper 3.4.5 and Mahout 0.7.0. Hortonworks says that data, scripts and jobs written for the platform are fully compatible with both the Linux and Microsoft Azure editions.

“Hortonworks continues to enable Windows users with powerful enterprise-grade Apache Hadoop,” stated Bob Page, the vice president of products for Hortonworks. “This new release enables organizations to build new types of applications that were previously not possible and to exploit the massive volumes and variety of data flowing into their data centers.”

The release of HDP 1.3 for Windows comes on the heels of Eric Baldeschwieler’s abrupt resignation as CTO. The executive has been replaced by Ari Zilka, the founder of application scalability giant Terracotta.

Baldweschwieler’s departure was announced a few weeks after the startup raised $50 million in funding from Tenaya Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and existing backers Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo. CEO Rob Bearden said that the capital will be used to scale global operations and accelerate product development.

Bearden served as the COO of Hortonworks until February 2012, when he replaced Baldeschwieler as chief exec. The move was perceived as a necessary reorganization, one that is not uncommon in early stage startups where technology-minded co-founders are often forced to take up the CEO reins until a better candidate is found.