Cloudera CEO Mike Olson said the partnership is a natural fit because Cloudera and Oracle already have many joint customers who will now be able to integrate Hadoop into their mission-critical environments in a relatively natural manner. He added that the companies worked very closely not only on software compatibility but also on tuning the Big Data Appliance to run Hadoop.

Looks like Oracle has realized the four realities very quickly in 2012 if it has to stand up to maintain its position and has moved within 10 days of the new year.

While Oracle has announced its BigData hardware BigData Appliance in Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Cloudera could be the biggest winner here gaining an upper hand over its upcoming competitors MapR and Hortonworks. The Big Data Appliance combines Apache Hadoop with a purpose-built hardware platform and software that includes platform components such as Linux and Java, as well as data management technologies such as the Oracle NoSql database and Oracle integration software.

The value add specifically will be felt by companies who does not have enough expertise to setup hadoop based environment to just pick up the integrated hadoop within the Oracle environment for all the big data analysis in house.

Announcing this on Cloudera blog, Ed Albanese (Business Development Lead, Cloudera) has pin pointed the market significance of this partnership and product as follows

• The Oracle Big Data Appliance is a tremendous validation of Apache Hadoop. The leading data management company in the world has released a highly engineered Apache Hadoop solution for global distribution.

• CDH users everywhere will benefit from increased choice. The breadth and quality of tools, applications, systems and services that support the CDH platform will undoubtedly grow as the Oracle ecosystem moves to support the Oracle Big Data Appliance.

• Oracle has made a decision to keep its entry into the Apache Hadoop market open source. Oracle customers who buy the Big Data Appliance get CDH bit for bit, unaltered and with the same license it currently ships with from cloudera.com – Apache v2.

• Cloudera customers who use Oracle technologies benefit immediately from tighter integration with more Oracle products. The Big Data Appliance is engineered to work with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle ExaLogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle NoSQL database and Oracle 11.