Yahoo and HortonWorks are hosting the fifth annual Hadoop Summit this week, and the floodgates are already open. A day before the conference kicks off the firm already took the opportunity to announce two major developments, including the launch of its first actual product.

In spite of the hype since its foundation last year, so far the startup has only been skirting around the Hadoop ecosystem with partnerships and service offerings. That is until today’s debut of the Hortonworks Data Platform. HDP is a full featured distribution of Hadoop that’s built for resellers rather than end users, and packs quite a few differentiating factors that set it apart from what companies like Cloudera and MapR are offering.

The platform is based on the first version of Hadoop, which is somewhat more stable than the second version. One of the other main features is that HDP offers visual dataset integration using the latest version of Talend’s Open Studio, which was updated just this week with the addition of support for Oozie and HCatalog. The Data Platform leverages the latter service to connect with traditional database environments, alongside the Apache Ambari config tool.

HortonWorks is also working on something called SQL-H to integrate its technology with the Teradata Aster Database.

HDP 1.0 is the core distribution, although it’s not the only one that was introduced today. The HA special is the result of a team-up with VMware and offers much deeper support for the cloud, with the capability to easily recover from server failure.

Derrick Harris commented on the announcement:

“Where the real intrigue comes is that the Hortonworks Data Platform HA edition will be available through VMware. This represents the furtherance of a unique partner strategy in which Hortonworks works closely with technology partners such as VMware, Microsoft and Teradata to develop products that leverage Hadoop while being more than mere integrations. “