By Joshua Jamerson
Hewlett-Packard Co. will extend its strategic partnership to
integrate engineering strategies with Hortonworks Inc., the
venture-backed Big Data company that is preparing to go public next
year.
The extension is supported by a $50 million equity investment by
H-P, which, as part of the partnership, uses Hortonworks Data
Platform as the Hadoop component of its own big data platform, HP
HAVEn.
The companies also said in a joint news release that H-P's
Martin Fink, executive vice president and chief technology officer,
will take a seat on Hortonworks' board. At H-P, Mr. Fink leads the
cloud business.
Hadoop, which can store and process very large amounts of data,
is an open source project developed by Yahoo Inc. from a paper
published by Google Inc.
H-P and Hortonworks also plan to broaden their existing
go-to-market collaboration as part of the partnership
extension.
The extension of the partnership underscores the sector's
current interest in Big Data, which investors believe is going to
produce big returns.
Hortonworks earlier this year raised $100 million, co-led by
investment giant BlackRock and hedge fund Passport Capital, at a
valuation of more than $1 billion. It competes directly with
Cloudera Inc., which also this year raised $160 million in new
funding for its own version of Hadoop.
Write to Joshua Jamerson at joshua.jamerson@dowjones.com
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