Hortonworks, BMC team up to support Hadoop automation

Hot on the heels of Hortonworks acquiring a security vendor to add its product to the trove of open source code that powers Hadoop, that company has word of yet another Hadoop addition.

Unlike Hortonworks’ last Hadoop announcement, this isn’t a product acquisition. Rather, it’s a strategic partnership wherein an existing company’s commercial product is being certified to support Hortonworks’ Hadoop edition.

The partner is BMC, makers of a software automation system called BMC Control-M. Control-M sports a plug-in architecture that allows support for a broad variety of products being added in, many of them business-process systems, such as mainframes or SAP or Oracle’s products.

So apart from the obvious mainframe/business-process angle — an angle Hadoop has been trying to play — why BMC? The answer: BMC already has experience working with Hadoop, specifically with integrating Hadoop jobs into enterprise workflows via Control-M.

In their press release, BMC and Hortonworks claim that if an administrator uses the Hadoop support added to Control-M, Hadoop can be “implemented faster by automating batch workflow creation and management using a drag and drop interface integrated with Hadoop projects.” Control-M also can be integrated with Hadoop’s various subcomponents to allow automation of workflow in HDFS or Hive, for instance, or to perform monitoring and predictive analytics on a whole Hadoop setup.

Third parties have been concocting management tools for Hadoop for some time, with Cloudera — makers of a Hadoop distribution that blends open source and commercial concerns — having added such tools to its product back in 2011. Hortonworks’ choice of BMC is aimed at Hadoop users who aren’t shy about making Hadoop central to their existing business processes (as per Cloudera’s own “data lake” concept, albeit tempered with common sense) rather than those who use Hadoop as an auxiliary.

To that end, it’s more likely this will appeal to companies that not only have a sizable central investment in Hadoop but also familiarity with Control-M or BMC’s products. It’s not likely to be a large market in terms of number of deployments, but most of those deployments ought to be names that both BMC and Hortonworks can point to as support for their case.

This partnership also hints at how Hortonworks can bolster its brand — and Hadoop generally — without going back on its promise to provide a pure open source version of the software: By partnering with third-party vendors who have no specific skin in the open source game and who can offer a commercial product that integrates equally with open and closed source.

This story, “Hortonworks, BMC team up to support Hadoop automation,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.