HP Buys $50M Stake in Enterprise Hadoop Heavyweight Hortonworks

HP has made a $50 million equity investment in Hortonworks, an enterprise Apache Hadoop distribution provider. HP has partnered with Hortonworks in the past.

The round is the latest development in a year that has seen Cloudera and Hortonworks trading blows in terms of both investment and acquisitions. Hortonworks closed a $100 million venture round in March. Cloudera is backed by Intel, Google Ventures and In-Q-tel and has raised more than $900 million in funding.

Hortonworks is a spin-off from Yahoo, which formed it together with Benchmark Capital in 2011.

The Hadoop market is getting heated, with several competitors vying for the enterprise space. It’s not a two-company race, and many players have placed big bets.

Google Capital led a $110 million round for enterprise Hadoop firm MapR in June, for example.  There’s also startup Pepperdata in the mix, which raised a $5 million Series A in April. Former Yahoo and Microsoft executives founded the company.

HP and Hortonworks will integrate their engineering strategies, deepening their existing relationship. HP customers will be able to deploy the Hortonworks Hadoop into HAVEn, its Big Data platform. HP is also working to certify HP Vertica with Apache Hadoop YARN, the architectural center of Hadoop 2.0.

HP will commit R&D resources to accelerate adoption of Hadoop with the Hortonworks Data Platform. HP’s executive vice president and CTO Martin Fink joins the Hortonworks board of directors.

“The ability to understand data and put it to effective use is now more crucial than ever,” said Colin Mahony, general manager, HP Vertica. “Hortonworks has demonstrated outstanding dedication and expertise in addressing the business and technology needs of its customers within this new era of information and data, and we look forward to partnering with the Hortonworks team to deliver innovative big data solutions to our customers.”

“We are extremely pleased to work more closely with HP to accelerate our joint customers’ transition to a modern data architecture,” Rob Bearden, Hortonworks CEO, said. “Through deep integration with Enterprise Apache Hadoop, HP customers will be able to easily build their next generation of applications with the Hortonworks Data Platform.”