Accenture partners with Hortonworks as big data rally continues
Enterprise Hadoop vendor Hortonworks and the global systems integrator and consulting company Accenture have added big data capabilities to their two-year-old professional partnership.
Much like the Cloudera/Capgemini partnership that was also announced Tuesday, the Hortonworks/Accenture team-up is focused on making big data more accessible for organizations still unfamiliar with the technology and its capabilities.
To be more specific, Hortonworks will serve up its Hadoop distribution platform to Accenture customers, while Accenture will offer support to clients looking to marry the Hortonworks data platform with their existing IT infrastructure.
The news is the latest in a string of similar collaborations, where big integrators are rallying behind big data much like they did software-as-a-service a few years back. It's also the second time in the last month that Accenture set its sights on a Hadoop distro to expand its capabilities with big data.
In June Accenture said it was aligning itself more closely with Cloudera in order to provide its clients access to the service provider's Apache Hadoop-powered enterprise data hub. That relationship is basically the same as the one just announced with Hortonworks, as the Hadoop platforms are both available to Accenture's clients as an option for storing data and offloading enterprise workloads.
What's unclear is how the seemingly similar partnerships will mesh once the platforms are both readily available within the Accenture ecosystem. Jason McIntyre, managing director of alliance management for Accenture Analytics, refrained from getting into details on that matter, instead reiterating that Hortonworks was and continues to be an interesting technology partner for Accenture's clients.
"As we work with so many of our clients we recognize that our clients are talking to Cloudera and Hortonworks and other Hadoop distros, and we are finding there are value propositions that all of them have and that are compelling to our clients," he said.
More:
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- Accenture partners with high-profile cloud services broker
- Cloudera buys big data encryption outfit Gazzang
- Cloudera raises $900 million, plots expansion