On Heels of IPO, Hortonworks Expands Certification Program
Last week was a momentous one for Hortonworks, which focuses on the Hadoop Big Data platform. The company had a successful IPO, driving home how focused many enterprises are on yielding more useful insights from their troves of data than standard data mining tools can provide.
Forrester Research wrote last month that Hadoop is now "a must have for large organizations." And, indeed, large companies ranging from Yahoo to eBay make extensive use of the platform. Now, Hortonworks has extended its technology partner program with the addition of three new certifications it offers.
The new enterprise components of the certification program, called HDP Operations Ready, HDP Security Ready and HDP Governance Ready, are targeted to enable organizations to adopt a modern data architecture with the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), supported by key enterprise Hadoop capabilities required of an enterprise data platform.
According to Hortonworks, key aspects of the new certification program components, relative to the HDP platform, include:
HDP Operations Ready: Delivers assurance to manage and run applications on HDP from an operational perspective. Specifically, integrates with Apache Ambari, using Ambari as a client to an enterprise management system, integrating Ambari-managed Hadoop components via Ambari Stacks, or providing tailored user tools with Ambari Views.
HDP Security Ready: Delivers tested and validated integration with security-related components of the platform. Beyond the ability to work in a Kerberos-enabled cluster, it is also designed to work with the Apache Knox gateway and Apache Ranger for comprehensive security integration and centralized management.
HDP Governance Ready: Provides assurance that data is integrated into the platform via automated and managed data pipelines as described and facilitated by the Apache Falcon data workflow engine.
"By offering one of the most comprehensive certification programs in the market, our technology partners are better enabled to help drive the modernization of enterprise data architectures," said Tim Hall, vice president of product management at Hortonworks, in a statement. "Our program gives vendors extremely valuable guidance and integration tools for the ecosystem and allows customers to be assured of an ecosystem that integrates well."
"Selecting certified technologies is important to us because it ensures interoperability with next-gen data architectures," added Mike Peterson, vice president, Platforms and Data Architecture at Neustar. "We support the Hortonworks Certified Technology Program and are pleased that key enterprise requirements we look for such as operations, security and governance have been added to the program."
Hortonworks claims that hundreds of vendors are now involved with its certification program. The company also offers extensive training on Hadoop-centric topics, as we covered here.
In enterprises as well as small businesses, the Big Data trend--sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information--is on the rise. Hadoop has become an open source star in this arena, and Dice.com and other employment-focused agencies report that there is strong demand for people with skills using Hadoop.