With this week’s release of HDP 2.0, Hortonworks is marrying Big Data and business analytics to make Hadoop more viable for the traditional enterprise. The latest version of the startup’s flagship distribution utilizes the YARN resource manager to let users store all of their data in one place for more convenient access and analysis.

Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0 takes Hadoop beyond batch analytics with support for stream processing and adhoc query courtesy of the Stinger Initiative. Phase 2 of the community-based effort resulted in Hive 0.12, a revamped version of the SQL-like interface that processes queries 100 times faster than the vanilla release while providing backward compatibility.

“The ability to process and expose data via multiple applications is a key element in extending the appeal of Hadoop as a foundational Big Data platform,” says Wikibon Principal Analyst Jeff Kelly. “Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0, with its YARN-based architecture, is another important step in moving Hadoop beyond simply large-scale batch analytics. While more work needs to be done, HDP 2.0 improves on the platform’s SQL-like capabilities and graph analysis, two important applications for Big Data practitioners.”

Kelly believes that in order to be truly ready for enterprise prime time, Hortonworks needs to tackle the four key pain points that its rivals have been working to address in recent months: security, continuous reliability availability, integration with legacy systems and simplified administration. The latter point encompasses deployment, management and monitoring, Kelly writes.

Hortonworks rival Cloudera has been particularly active on the security front. The firm recently added support for Accumulo, an ultrasecure key value store originally developed for the NSA, to complement its Sentry RBAC solution for Hadoop. Announced in July, the open source tool provides “unprecedented“ control over unstructured data in HDFS.

Over in the services space, Savvis just announced a set of complementary offerings for Cloudera and MapR’s Hadoop distributions. The new services include licensing and operations management, planning, implementation and business case consulting. Not to be outdone, Hortonworks promptly accepted data management provider RedPoint into its Certified Technology Partner Program.