Yahoo Tries to Cash In on Hadoop with Hortonworks Joint-Venture

Yahoo has made it official, its plans to launch a separate company to handle and monetize its investment in Hadoop have been announced. Yahoo, with funding from Benchmark Capital, is launching Hortonworks, an independent company which will focus on selling Hadoop-based solutions to the enterprise environment.

"Today Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital announced the formation of Hortonworks. Hortonworks is a new, independent company founded based on the Apache Hadoop technology pioneered at Yahoo!," Yahoo announced.

"The formation of Hortonworks increases investment in the development of Apache Hadoop and will accelerate adoption by making it more robust and easier to install, manage and use for enterprises and technology vendors," it added.

"This investment will enable Apache Hadoop to meet the growing market demand and become the big data management and analysis platform of choice for the industry," it explained.

Yahoo has been involved with the creation and development of Hadoop from the get go. The software suite, which is designed to process and manage huge amounts of data quickly and efficiently, the type of thing large websites or big tech corporations need to do, is used by Yahoo extensively.

Already, 42,000 servers are running Hadoop at Yahoo, so the company has a clear interest in it. No surprise then that it has contributed about 70 percent of the code for the project.

Until recently, Yahoo was running a custom, internal version of Hadoop, but it decided to merge all of the changes into the mainline Apache Hadoop and will not support the Apache version exclusively.

This is the version that Yahoo will try to monetize via the Hortonworks joint venture. It's hardly the only company to try to make money from Hadoop but it will probably be the first if it succeeds.

Hortonworks has about 25 employees now, mostly from Yahoo, and will focus on creating products ready to be used by enterprises, but also contribute o the Apache project. At the same time, Yahoo engineers will continue to support and develop Hadoop as well.