Yahoo to spread cloud tech through Hadoop

Yahoo is looking to give away its cloud-computing technology to anyone who wants it via its Hadoop initiative in an effort to establish its software as the foundation and standards for the "emerging cloud revolution", according to a company executive.

The company's chief scientist of audience and cloud-computing research Raghu Ramakrishnan said on Monday that Yahoo has made a business decision to focus on monetising its cloud-computing know-how. This will be achieved through its consumer-facing products such as its search engine and news portal, instead of offering similar cloud offerings touted in the market today.

With regard to refining its consumer products, Ramakrishnan said that Yahoo is working with developers through its open-source project Hadoop — the company's analytics and data-warehousing framework — to improve its compute capabilities. The Hadoop framework was made available to the open-source community in June and, since then, Yahoo has contributed about 70 percent of all code written, he added.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Yahoo spins cloud web around competitor on ZDNet Asia.