Another week, another landmark partnership in the world of Hadoop. Market leader Cloudera Inc. has inked an agreement with Dell Inc. under which the hardware giant’s consultancy business will provide systems integration services for organizations seeking to deploy its data crunching platform but don’t have the internal talent to do so on their own.

The move builds on an already robust relationship between the companies that dates back to the dawn of the Hadoop phenomenon in 2011, when the then-still-publicly traded Dell became one of the first major data center suppliers to endorse Cloudera’s vision of a centralized platform for storing different types of enterprise data. But as Cloudera has become a driving force behind the analytics revolution, raising more than a billion dollars in funding along the way, the partnership didn’t evolve much much beyond its original parameters.

Dell stuck to offering pre-configured systems for running Cloudera’s Hadoop distro while Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco Systems Inc., IBM and other competitors that were slower to catch on to Big Data’s potential jumped on the bandwagon with their own integrated appliances. Dell became just another name on the list of hardware partners looking to latch on to Cloudera’s success.

Dell hopes to change that with the new deal.  It catapults the vendor into the ranks of the select few partners that not only have a hardware portfolio extensive enough to support the different requirements of Cloudera’s diverse customer base but also the consultancy muscle to put it all together into a cohesive whole.

As part of that one-stop-shop value proposition, Dell is lining up a broad array of services that extends far beyond just helping organizations implement Cloudera’s distribution in their on-premise environments. Among other things, the company  is offering to integrate the platform into existing enterprise data warehousing systems so that customers can take advantage of the cost efficiencies of Hadoop without having to abandon legacy investments.

Dell plans to get its foot in the door with archiving, a low-priority process involving large amounts of data that represents an ideal pilot use case for Hadoop, and gradually expand to other areas from there. Additionally, the hardware maker is giving customers the option of writing up their Cloudera deployments to infrastructure sensors in order to enable real-time monitoring and more efficient maintenance. That’s in addition to the usual application management, troubleshooting and support services.

As important as it is for Dell, the agreement arguably represents an even more significant boost for Cloudera, which is now in a position to take advantage of the vendor’s global sales and consultancy footprint to reach markets it couldn’t access by itself. That means more revenue opportunities, which the distributor only needs more of as it moves closer towards a public offering.

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