Hortonworks Accelerates Cloud Innovation for Customers with Microsoft Azure HDInsight

SANTA CLARA, Calif., and NEW YORK, Sept. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- (Strata + Hadoop World) –Hortonworks, Inc.^® (NASDAQ: HDP) today announced updates to the Microsoft Azure HDInsight Hadoop Cloud solution. As part of its collaboration with Microsoft, these updates will allow customers to achieve big data query speeds that approach data warehousing performance, provide a highly secure Hadoop solution in the cloud, and allow for an easier experience for administrators to spin up third party ISV applications. HDInsight in Azure has emerged as a leading option for today's modern organizations as they embrace a cloud-first approach to Big Data workloads. Customers have already experienced key benefits, as they take advantage of flexible connected data architectures to deliver real-time insights and positive business outcomes.

By embracing Azure HDInsight, which delivers Apache™ Hadoop^® and Apache Spark™ powered by Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP^®), organizations can future-proof their connected data architectures with a solution that is easy to manage and quick to deploy. Teaming with Microsoft, Hortonworks has pioneered cloud solutions for over four years, and has seen great customer traction as organizations have turned towards HDInsight to help power their data-centric operations.

Connected Data Architecture

Cloud has become an important aspect of today's Big Data environments and is expected to grow in importance in the coming years. The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016 report calls out that "enterprises of all types and sizes are increasingly embracing the cloud as an important catapult for their business technology agenda." Microsoft received the highest score in the current offering and strategy categories in this report.

A connected data architecture enables organizations to harness the agility and elasticity of the cloud to power new workloads and analytic applications, while also providing the always-on security and governance services needed for today's enterprise. With connected data architectures, organizations are able to combine data-in-motion and data-at-rest to deliver actionable insights, whether the data resides in the data center or in the cloud. This flexibility is a requirement for many of today's modern data applications.

Updates to HDInsight

A key area of focus for Hortonworks is to enable organizations to rapidly adopt Hadoop by delivering an enterprise-grade managed service and making it easier for users. This has been a continued focus reflected in Azure HDInsight, which has the highest service level agreement amongst Cloud Hadoop options with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. It also has the highest levels of customer support backed by Microsoft and Hortonworks, and a highly productive experience for developers and data scientists with Microsoft Visual Studio, IntelliJ, and Jupyter notebook integration.

As part of Strata, Hortonworks, along with innovations being delivered by Microsoft, is furthering leadership in these categories by announcing the availability of HDInsight running Hortonworks Data Platform 2.5. Hortonworks has become the first cloud Hadoop solution to provide Apache Hive using LLAP to reach sub-second querying on big data, and the first to provide Azure Active Directory and Apache Ranger integration, providing customers with a more secure environment for doing Cloud Hadoop. Hortonworks is also enabling easier experiences for end-users with Apache Zeppelin notebooks integration, and point-and-click integration with third party ISV vendors. In addition:

• Hive with LLAP is available today. As part of Hortonworks Data Platform 2.5, HDInsight will now offer new clusters that run Hive with LLAP in public preview. LLAP, alongside the latest version of Hive, brings a speed improvement up to 25x when compared to Hive on Tez opening scenarios to do interactive BI and reporting on Big Data.
• Spark 2.0 is available today. This brings faster performance as well as broader support of the SQL syntax, an improved streaming engine to build real-time solutions, and improvements to ML pipelines.
• Security advancements are planned for public preview, bringing the highest levels of security yet for authentication, authorization, auditing, and encryption through seamless integration to Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Domain Services, Apache Ranger integration, and server-side encryption of data at rest.
• Zeppelin notebook support is available today, bringing out-of-the-box experiences for data scientists to create narratives and visualizations.
• ISV application integration is available today, providing the easiest way for customers to spin up third party solutions that have been pre-integrated and pre-tuned to run directly on HDInsight clusters without having to run separately available VMs.

Customers Embracing HDInsight

Customers around the world and in various vertical markets have embraced HDInsight and experienced positive business results. Customers include:

• Zirous, an IT Consulting Firm, is committed to executing best practices and going above and beyond industry standards to provide viable solutions for their clients. With HDInsight, Zirous is able to provide increased speed of deployment for clients. As it works with multiple clients who are new to Hadoop, the ability to demonstrate data analysis in a few hours, as opposed to a few days, has been a convincing proof point for the power of Hadoop.
• arvato Financial Services has utilized HDInsight for risk management and fraud detection. By combining cloud computing, advanced analytics and Big Data, the firm uncovered valuable insights which are being used in the strategic project development of new cloud-based risk management services.
• Dominion Enterprises, a media and information services company for the automotive, real estate, apartment rental and travel industries, has deployed HDInsight as part of its move towards becoming a more data-driven business. Along with HDInsight, Dominion Enterprises is using Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF) as it looks to obtain a single view of their customers to understand the performance drivers in their market.

Customers can try Azure HDInsight today. For more information about Azure HDInsight, please visit http://hortonworks.com/products/cloud/azure/. Also, download The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016 report here.

Executive and Customer Quotes

• "Hadoop in the cloud is becoming a game-changing platform for many organizations. Microsoft Azure HDInsight gives customers the power of HDP, including the latest versions of Spark, to help deliver real-time insights and analysis. We are proud of our work with Microsoft and the solution we've developed, which is making a big difference for many of our customers." – Rob Bearden, Chief Executive Officer, Hortonworks
• "Microsoft continues to focus on making big data accessible to everybody by offering an enterprise-grade managed service in the cloud and making it easier for end users. With the new capabilities announced at Strata, Microsoft Azure HDInsight is faster, more secure, and easier to use, furthering our leadership by providing our customers an easy-to-use Hadoop solution that they can trust. There is no other Cloud Hadoop solution that provides our level of Service Level Agreement, security integration, and technical support backed by Microsoft and Hortonworks." – Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President, Data Group, Microsoft
• "With HDInsight, we get speed of deployment and therefore quicker adoption with our clients. Most of our clients are working with Hadoop for the first time, so they're worried about supporting new technology. By implementing this platform as a service, it helps calm any of their fears of a skills gap. We can show our clients they can analyze data in a few hours, as opposed to a few days or even a week with a standard environment." - Ryan Fye, Director of Data Analytics, Zirous
• "In many cases, traditional risk management solutions offered by credit agencies do not go far enough, and fraud techniques are becoming more sophisticated all the time. It has become necessary to find intelligent, rapidly scalable solutions which can be used to analyze transaction data in real time in order to keep pace with these developments. Combining Microsoft Azure services and HDP in Microsoft Azure HDInsight, with its Storm and Hadoop open-source framework, to create an integrated, cloud-based solution is Big Data at its best." - Andreas Czermak, Director, Big Data Projects & Strategy, arvato Financial Solutions
• "We love how quickly HDInsight allows us to rapidly prototype. It enables our data scientists and analysts to work quickly and cost-effectively, without interfering with production workflows. It's so easy to spin up and spin down the cluster, as well as to scale it. HDInsight, powered by Hortonworks Data Platform, has enabled our data professionals to have equal accessibility to our data. It doesn't matter if you're using Excel, Power BI, Python, R, or a high-order language. HDInsight has leveled the playing field for these data professionals and allows them to interact and collaborate on tools in the way they know how." - Christopher Samulski, Data Architect at ForRent.com® – A Dominion Enterprises company.

About Hortonworks
Hortonworks is an industry leading innovator that creates, distributes and supports enterprise-ready open data platforms and modern data applications that deliver actionable intelligence from all data: data-in-motion and data-at-rest. Hortonworks is focused on driving innovation in open source communities such as Apache Hadoop, Apache NiFi and Apache Spark. Along with its 1,800+ partners, Hortonworks provides the expertise, training and services that allow customers to unlock transformational value for their organizations across any line of business.

Hortonworks, HDP and HDF are registered trademarks or trademarks of Hortonworks, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. For more information, please visit www.hortonworks.com. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Hortonworks Contact
Michelle Lazzar
(408) 828-9681
[email protected]

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SOURCE Hortonworks, Inc.

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