Hadoop Developer Hortonworks Debuts New Partner Program

**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of December’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

Software company Hortonworks unveiled a global partner program Thursday, saying it was time to help its network of 15,000 partners get to another level.

“This program is really us up-leveling our capabilities, our commitment to the resources, the enablement to our partners,” Chris Sullivan, vice president of global channels and alliances, told Channel Partners. “It’s transforming the program as a next step in our continued evolution as a channel-centric business.”

Company executives say the Partnerworks program, which includes tiers for independent hardware and software vendors (ISV/IHVs), consultants and resellers, will upgrade value proposition and benefits for members of the previous channel program.

“That program has served us well for the first few years of our company,” Sullivan told Channel Partners. “We’ve got a great foundation of partnerships.”

The California-based company works with Apache Hadoop, the open-source platform that Sullivan says will be processing half of the world’s data within the next five years. He called Hortonworks “the only 100 percent open data company,” owing to the large number of Apache committers that it employs.{ad}

“Those are the folks that are writing the code, enhancing the technology, supporting the technology in its development and innovation,” he said.

The four-year-old company develops and distributes Hadoop through a program called HDP. The end result, as Erin Smith, vice president of communications at Hortonworks puts it, is “providing big-data platforms for customers to manage all their data.”

Sullivan points to two major benefits of the new channel program: technology leadership and up-leveled go-to-market capabilities.

“We want to make sure that as our partners enter the program, we have a very, very strong community of ISV and IHV technology partners who want to be able to apply the best resources from an architectural perspective, to help those partners come in, learn about Hortonworks, learn about our technology, become certified and enabled to go out and create even stronger value propositions for their customers,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said the open-data mindset of Hortonworks and Hadoop is what differentiates the new global partner program.

“True innovation not in the isolation of a single company, but in an open community,” he said.

The new program will launch in February.