Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) distribution of Hadoop, the open source platform for Big Data infrastructure, gained its first VAR channel partnership this week with the announcement that En Pointe Technologies will begin selling products and services related to the software. In addition to promoting Intel's distribution of Hadoop, the news also signals a stronger presence by En Pointe within the Big Data space.

Founded in 1993, En Pointe develops a range of products and services for medium and large enterprise in the business, education, government and non-profit markets. It's already well-established in the cloud, storage and collaboration niches, where it offers reseller solutions based on a variety of major IT brands. Its focus is on deriving value by providing complete, integrated hardware, software and licensing packages.

The announcement of an En Pointe offering based on Intel's Hadoop Distribution expands the company's reseller initiatives into the Big Data market. Through the agreement, En Pointe will sell hardware, software and services for organizations deploying Hadoop Distribution. En Pointe is the first VAR to offer software, support and training for Intel's implementation of Hadoop.

By using Intel hardware along with the Intel Distribution, En Pointe said its reseller product can "further optimize Hadoop deployments for customers with unique capabilities and performance, in addition to improving data access, maximizing productivity, limiting energy consumption and minimizing operating costs." It also offers integration of Intel's Hadoop Distribution into a hosted environment provided by dinCloud.

Intel's Hadoop Distribution (that is, by the way, the official, perhaps somewhat uncreative name of Intel's distribution of Apache Hadoop) is a relative newcomer to the Hadoop ecosystem, where a number of competing versions from other vendors already enjoy established market share. But Intel is in a position to offer new Big Data features by embedding Hadoop functionality into low-level hardware. Hadoop Distribution, according to Intel, is "engineered from the silicon up to get the most out of your hardware for Big Data analytics."

Whether other VARs will follow suit and develop their own products around Hadoop Distribution remains to be seen. But given the potential Intel is creating for integrating hardware and software within Big Data solutions through its Hadoop implementation, the opportunities for further channel partnerships seem promising. And whatever happens, it will almost certainly prove to be good news for the open source world, where Hadoop's predominance as a key component of Big Data infrastructure is driving enormous growth for developers and vendors in a number of niches.