Jun 28, 2011 10:11 GMT  ·  By

There have been rumors of Yahoo launching a commercial operation around Apache Hadoop and now we have more details, a name and a likely release date.

Yahoo's joint-venture will be named Horton Works and will focus on creating a Hadoop-based product ready for enterprise adoption. Yahoo is expected to reveal the new company later today or tomorrow at its yearly Hadoop Summit.

Earlier this year, Yahoo discontinued its own version of Hadoop and merged all of its contributions into the mainline Apache Hadoop.

Yahoo has been a major contributor to the project and has provided about 70 percent of the code already.

However, so far, Yahoo has only been using Hadoop to power its own websites and services, which is why it continued to invest in the project.

Others though started to look at the opportunity of selling customized products based on Hadoop to enterprises as well as offer support in deploying and running the software tools.

Yahoo has been thinking about entering the space itself and will do so with the new Horton Works spin-off company. Hadoop offers a set of tools designed to handle and process massive amounts of data.

It's an open source project that Yahoo has contributed greatly to, but which has been adopted by other large websites as well, Facebook being a prime example.

Hadoop is a great tool for large websites, which is why Yahoo is using it in the first place, but it can be useful for smaller enterprises as well.

Already, startups like Cloudera and more recently EMC have been trying to turn Hadoop into a business. Analysts believe that there is a potential billion-dollar market for the open source software, so the stakes are high.

So far though, neither company has been converting the interest into too much money. With Yahoo joining the fray, the competition will only harden. Still, the expectation is that businesses will start turning to Hadoop to handle their most intensive computing tasks.