Just days after Cloudera Inc. joined EMC Corp.’s Technology Connect partner program, its arch-rival Hortonworks Inc. has also signed up as a select partner, creating a vital new sales channel for its Hadoop distribution.

Like the Cloudera arrangement, the deal means that EMC can now resell – either directly or through its channel partners – the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is already certified to run on EMC’s Isilon Big Data storage solution.

EMC already has an established partnership with Hortonworks, having certified and integrated HDP as an Hadoop option on its EMC Isilon Data Lake Foundation. In addition, EMC is one of the founding members of the controversial Open Data Platform, a Hortonworks-led initiative that aims to accelerate Hadoop adoption in the enterprise despite receiving heavy criticism from Cloudera and MapR Technologies Inc., the other member of Hadoop’s “big three”.

“EMC is a global leader in enabling providers to transform their operations, and we are excited to be accelerating our partnership,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president of corporate strategy at Hortonworks. “Through this reseller agreement and becoming an EMC Select Partner, we look forward to working strategically with EMC to assist our collective customers and partners to adopt Open Enterprise Hadoop as a complementary component of their data architectures”.

For its part, EMC sounds just as enthusiastic. The storage giant said that customers who’re looking to introduce an analytics solution can choose from a variety of resilient and cost-efficient infrastructures.

Ryan Peterson, chief solutions strategist at EMC, elaborated on this in a blog post, saying the company needs to pair Isilon with distributed computing platforms so customers can process and analyze their data to gain new insights and better inform their business decisions.

“Looking at things in a practical manner, we’ve always known that combining two sets of data can provide incredible results,” Peterson wrote. “Take, for example, the combination of a customer list, with customer orders and with inventory data. But people and things have started creating new data in new places — whether it be from social data containing customer sentiment or sensors collecting temperatures, we now have data sets that grow well beyond those tables of small data sets.”

The expanded partnership comes almost immediately after EMC began selling its “Cloudera-on-Isilon” solution, whereby EMC’s customers can license Cloudera’s Hadoop software directly through the storage giant.

“Thousands of EMC Isilon customers already have a data lake. Now with the jointly certified Cloudera-on-Isilon solution, they have an engine to do even more complex data analysis,” Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing of the Emerging Technologies Division at EMC, said at the time.