The burgeoning Hadoop ecosystem looks to be continuing on its aggressive growth trajectory, garnering yet more momentum with a string of new and expanded strategic partnerships marking the latest steps forward in the accelerating trend towards consolidation that Wikibon had identified back in February.

The industry seemed to have progressed quite a ways over the last few months. The focus is now expanding beyond product integrations to professional services, with the major tech consultancy giants already elbowing their way into the fray. Accenture, among the largest of them all, has just taken the next step in its relationship with Hortonworks by turning its two-year-old collaboration with the Hadoop distributor to a full-blown alliance.

Making big friends

The system integration giant said in a statement this morning that the move is meant at making things easier for its large enterprise clients to adapt for the new reality of analytics. The partnership will center on helping clients graduate their Hadoop projects from pilot to production, where it can be used to look for useful insights at a much larger scale than just one specific department or silo.

The consultancy is apparently aiming for both traditional batch processing use cases and real-time workloads such as sensor and machine-generated logs, which have been gaining traction among Hadoop users since the introduction of YARN with the latest stable release. The resource management technology makes it possible to run multiple applications in Hadoop, including Spark, a fast rising stream processing engine that earned the endorsement of Hortonworks.

Under the alliance, Accenture and the distributor will also collaborate on helping customers hook up the data-crunching platform into their existing infrastructure, which theoretically encompasses everything from monolithic business intelligence implementations to IT-approved mobile apps. As Wikibon noted in its February report, integration with backend systems is essential to moving Hadoop beyond the experimentation stage in the enterprise scene, where CIOs are have to balance new initiatives with the need to sustain existing investments.

The partnership between Accenture and Hortonworks comes less than a month after the consulting powerhouse announced a similar alliance with Cloudera, which in turn yesterday teamed up with Capgemini.

Branching out

The alliance between Accenture and Hortonworks was unveiled within minutes of the latter throwing its weight behind Actian alongside four other major industry players in the latest sign of the growing overlap between the groups of vendors that have formed in the Hadoop ecosystem as a result of all the aggressive partnering.

Actian develops a columnar database called Vector that utilizes traditional SQL syntax and is described as up to up to 30 times faster than the competition. The platform has recently been adapted to run on Hadoop in an effort by the company to combine the best of old and new in a single native package. As of this morning, the offering is fully compatible with the latest version of Hortonworks’ distro as well as Tableau’s hugely popular data visualization solution. Plus, it’s now being promoted by three more channel heavyhitters: MicroStrategy, Penguin Computing and Slalom Consulting.

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