Of all the players, pure-play Hortonworks hews closest to the Apache Hadoop open source community with Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), but also aggressively pursues deep engineering partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, Teradata, SAP, Red Hat and others.
“Hortonworks’ strategy is to drive all innovation through the open source community and create an ecosystem of partners that accelerate Hadoop adoption among enterprises,” Gualtieri writes. “Where the open source community isn’t moving fast enough, Hortonworks will start new projects and commit Hortonworks resources to get them off the ground.”
Apache Ambari, which provides a Hadoop cluster management console, is a key example.