IBM Corp. and Cloudera Inc. are teaming up to expand the adoption of their data processing products.

The companies today announced a go-to-market partnership that will see them cross-sell key software from each other’s analytics portfolios. The alliance represents a continuation of IBM’s years-long alliance with Hortonworks Inc., which merged with Cloudera in a deal inked last October.

Cloudera sells a commercial version of Hadoop, an open-source platform that allows enterprises to analyze massive amounts of data. The company also provides complementary tools for related use cases such as stream processing. When it was an independent entity, Hortonworks offered a competing suite of Hadoop-centric analytics products that Cloudera is currently integrating into its portfolio.

The partnership with IBM will see Cloudera add two new tools to the lineup of solutions it offers to enterprises. The first is IBM’s Watson Studio, a workbench for building artificial intelligence models. Cloudera will also resell BigSQL, an engine that allows analytics team to perform data processing with Hadoop using the popular SQL query language.

IBM, in turn, will promote the company’s DataFlow, Enterprise Data Hub and Data Science Workbench to customers. DataFlow is a stream processing engine that Cloudera acquired as part of the Hortonworks deal, Enterprise Data Hub is its flagship Hadoop-based analytics platform, and the Data Science Workbench is a self-service enterprise platform that lets data scientists manage analytics pipelines to speed up machine learning projects.

The Enterprise Data Hub will soon be succeeded by the Cloudera Data Platform, an upcoming solution set to integrate the company’s homegrown features with the software Hortonworks has brought to the table. The platform will run on both on-premises and on public cloud infrastructure.

The transition to the new offering was named as one of the factors in Cloudera’s earnings miss last quarter. The company reported revenues of $187.5 million for the three months ended April 30, below projections of Wall Street analysts. Its second-quarter and full-year guidance fell short of expectations as well.

The partnership with IBM may give the company a needed boost as it works to sell enterprises on its post-merger vision for data analytics.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE