The big news in the Hadoop world today was the release of Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0. It boasts a YARN-based architecture designed to make HDP a true multi-application platform. That means in addition to batch analytics jobs, HDP can also tackle SQL-like analytics, graph analysis and other analytic workloads.

HDP is the result of a lot of hard work by the team at Hortonworks as well as all the committers to Apache Hadoop (HDP is 100% open source Apache Hadoop.) The goal of everyone in the Hadoop community is to make the open source Big Data framework truly ready for the enterprise.

To do so means tackling a number of important capabilities. In addition to making Hadoop a multi-application platform, the other enterprise-grade capabilities required are (in my opinion):

• Rock-solid security;
• Continuous and reliable availability;
• Easier-to-use deployment, administration and monitoring tools;
• Simple integration capabilities with existing infrastructure and systems;

Other vendors have also tackled these issues. Cloudera has put significant effort into Sentry, it’s role-based security project, and Cloudera Search, designed to make data in HDFS accessible via a Google-like interface. WANdisco, a U.K.-based company, has made great strides in making Hadoop continuously available with its Non-Stop Hadoop software. And there are others.

So, thanks to the efforts of vendors and the open source community, can we definitively say Hadoop is ready for the enterprise? That’s the billion dollar question. How would you answer it?

Tomorrow’s your chance to be heard. Join us tomorrow at 3pm ET/noon PT for a CrowdChat to answer this very question: Is Hadoop Enterprise-Ready? Just log on to CrowdChat.net/BigDataNYC with your Twittter or LinkedIn profile and get ready for a spirited debate. This is the fourth in a series of CrowdChats leading up to #theCUBE’s #BigDataNYC event in New York City next week. You can find all the details here.