Revolution Analytics lines up Hortonworks, Intel Hadoop pacts

Revolution Analytics on Tuesday lined up a Hadoop partnership with Hortonworks as its analytics platform increasingly rides on top of big data projects. And for good measure, Revolution Analytics is among the first to line up behind Intel's distribution. 

At the O'Reilly Strata Conference, Revolution Analytics, a startup with about 55 employees, said it has lined up its fourth Hadoop distribution partner. Revolution Analytics, which provides data modeling via the open source R project, is also partnered with Cloudera, IBM's BigInsights distribution and Intel's big data platform.

In the short-term, Revolution Analytics deal with Hortonworks will provide more pop. Revolution Analytics competes with legacy analytics players such as SAS. By forging a host of Hadoop partnerships, Revolution Analytics is aiming to be a front-end platform for the big data wave.

David Smith, data scientist and vice president of marketing and community at Revolution Analytics, said the company has supported Hadoop connections for about 18 months. The company has more than 200 customers and with new prospects "at least half of them have some kind of Hadoop implementation," said Smith.

The other half of new customers are based on more SQL-based queries, he said. "We ride on top of both," said Smith.

Under the Hortonworks partnership, Revolution Analytics will develop so-called "in-Hadoop" predictive analytics to avoid importing and exporting data from Hadoop. Under the arrangement, Hortonworks customers can use Revolution R Enterprise ScaleR on a server, via streaming data, an import or their own algorithms.