The future of the tech world is too complex for any one company to navigate alone. Industry giant Microsoft Corp. knows this better than most. It has reached out to other companies and other ecosystems to help drive its future innovations. One of those companies is Hortonworks Inc., a big data enterprise software business. Together, they’re looking toward the future of the cloud.

“We are truly adopting the cloud-first,” said Wei Wang (pictured, right), senior director of product marketing at Hortonworks, concerning Microsoft’s cloud approach.

Wang announced that Hortonworks is putting the Hortonworks Data Platform (an enterprise-ready open-source Hadoop distribution based on a centralized architecture) on Microsoft’s HDInsight, a cloud Spark and Hadoop service for the enterprise.

She and her colleague, Oliver Chiu (pictured, left), senior product marketing manager for big data and data warehousing at Microsoft, sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during BigData SV 2017 conference in San Jose, CA, to talk cloud strategy (*Disclosure below.)

Adoption, integration, trust

For most businesses, going to the cloud is no small matter. Because of this, cloud adoption is still a journey. Microsoft and Hortonworks plan to help organizations through this journey. More than a quarter of Hortonworks customers have a cloud strategy, according to Wang. Because of this growing trend, Hortonworks is aiming its latest innovations for a cloud-first plan.

Microsoft has also responded to the cloud adoption trend. Its had made the transition to cloud-first years ago, explained Chiu. Now, they’re building new cloud services, all of which integrate with Microsoft’s raft of high-power services like machine learning and data science. He called this integration a testament to the great partnership with Hortonworks.

The line is starting to blur on what data people want to put in the cloud, Wang stated. New innovations and functionality are making companies more comfortable with taking their data to the cloud. To improve further adoption, business must trust the cloud’s speed, reliability and ease of use, she said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData SV 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE