A new trend has emerged in the open-source Big Data  ecosystem over the last few months: top vendors scaling back and sometimes completely abandoning internal efforts to develop homegrown versions of hot new projects in favor of forming strategic partnerships with pure-play distributors.

First it was Intel Corp. with its $740 million investment in Cloudera Inc.,  which saw the chip giant pull the plug on its proprietary Hadoop offering in favor of a co-development agreement. Then last week, Oracle Corp. entered a broad strategic alliance with OpenStack startup Mirantis Inc. to counter Red Hat Inc.’s fast growth, a move that spelled the early end of the database maker’s two-month push to develop its own version of the cloud operating system.

Now it’s back to Hadoop with a partnership between Cloudera, Inc. rival Hortonworks Inc. and Pivotal Software, Inc. the cloud analytics venture that spun out of enterprise storage stalwart EMC and virtualization subsidiary VMware last April. The companies will collaborate to expand the capabilities of Apache Ambari, which provides a set of features for scaling, monitoring and integrating the batch processing engine into existing infrastructure aimed at simplifying how large-scale analytic clusters are operated.

The recently updated project competes directly with the Pivotal Command Center, the proprietary orchestration engine that ships with the vendor’s Hadoop distro. There has been no official update on the status of the offering yet, but it’s safe to assume the partnership with Hortonworks could see it pull the plug on the software so as to be able focus entirely on the new collaboration. The team-up marks the latest milestone in the open-source journey of the EMC federation, which has been steadily warming up to the community over the last few years in a bid to rally the community behind its ambitious “Third Platform for IT” cause.  The vendor had previously added support for the Swift object storage component of OpenStack to its ViPR platform.

The company and its subsidiaries are following a similar trajectory as Bright Computing Inc., which sells a cluster management software of its own. Unlike Ambari, however, the software not only works with Hadoop but a wide range of other systems as well, including supercomputers, popular databases and OpenStack. Hot on the heels of the alliance between Pivotal and Hortonworks, the firm announced that it has netted $14.5 million in a second round of funding led by by early Skype backer Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Esprit, its European branch.  Prime Ventures and existing investor ING Corporate Investments chipped in as well.

Bright said that the capital will be used to expand support for Hadoop and OpenStack and expand its ecosystem, which already includes industry heavy-hitters such as Amazon, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc, and Stanford University. The firm shares that razor-sharp partner focus with Actian, another rising star in the Hadoop ecosystem that beat Pivotal to teaming up with Hortonworks and is now shifting its focus back to customers with a new jumpstart initiative.

Unveiled this morning, the Clear Path Program provides preconfigured workflows for Actian’s flagship SQL-based columnar database, which runs directly on the batch processing framework and is described as up to 30 times faster than competing offerings. Also included are workshops meant to train customers on applying data science in various use cases.

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