At the 2013 O’Reilly Strata Conference, SiliconAngle’s John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante sat down with John Kreisa, Vice President of Marketing at Hortonworks, and Herain Oberoi, Director of Product Marketing for the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, and discussed Hortonworks and Microsoft’s collaboration on development of a new Hadoop platform.

Kreisa began by emphasizing that Hadoop has more than arrived as the de facto data programming framework, and a key goal of Hortonworks’ is to make it as broadly available to the market as possible. He explains that it is with this goal in mind that makes their partnership with Microsoft such a logical decision.

Recently, Hortonworks announced their data platform for Windows, the result of a strong partnership with Microsoft to port Hadoop to Windows, making it possible to run Hadoop natively on Windows servers. With this new development, Kreisa explains, Hortonworks has the only data platform compatible with both Linux and Windows, which takes advantage of Microsoft’s large market base, and greatly expands their availability to developers who are established and familiar with Microsoft tools.

Oberoi returns the favor, explaining to John Furrier that while Microsoft was searching out possible engineering partners, Hortonworks stood out to them because of their number of committers, their high level of innovation, and their involvement with the Apache Community.

He explains that their partnership functions efficiently with Microsoft engineers working on how to simplify Hortonworks’ developments and port them to Windows, while Hortonworks focuses on how to give back to the Apache Community in the most effective way.

You can catch the full recording of this interview on our YouTube channel later today, where you’ll also find more exclusive content from Strata and other Big Data and Cloud events.