In another sign of the ever-fuzzier line between the corporate data center and the cloud, big data software company Hortonworks Inc. today announced that its data handling and analysis software is now available on Amazon.com’s Inc. cloud computing service.

The Hortonworks Data Cloud for Amazon Web Services was announced in a technical preview in June at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, Calif. Today marks its commercial availability on the AWS Marketplace, the cloud provider’s online store of software and services.

Hortonworks, whose software helps companies collect and analyze massive amounts of data across networks of computers, says the Data Cloud for AWS will be a simpler subset of Hortonworks’ full software, and it also won’t have the breadth of capabilities of Hortonworks’ joint Azure HDInsight service with Microsoft Corp. It’s intended to be used mostly on “ephemeral” or short-running applications that businesses want to get up and running simply and quickly.

“It handles all the complexity for you,” Hortonworks Chief Strategy Officer Shaun Connolly (above) said in an interview. “You can be up and running in minutes.”

Hortonworks envisions three main uses, for which it has specifically tuned the software. One is data science and exploration, mostly using the open source software Spark, which enables fast data analytics by distributing work across many computers. Another is the process of preparing data for analysis, known as extract, transform and load, or ETL, using Spark, the Hadoop software for storing lots of data across machines, and the database Hive. The third is high-speed data analytics and reporting using Hive.

The move reflects Hortonworks’ hope that customers already using AWS increasingly will want to run more enterprise-oriented software such as Hortonworks’ rather than AWS’s plain-vanilla or standard open source versions. It’s also an admission that many large companies still struggle to implement Big Data systems such as those from Hortonworks, Cloudera Inc. and MapR Inc. because of the software’s complexity. There’s a confusing array of options that are difficult to configure and use, thanks partly to a lack of relevant talent.

At the same time, these big data software companies face challenges from cloud providers such as AWS that increasingly provide their own big data analysis services. Amazon itself is reaching out to link its cloud with on-premises data centers, recently forging a deal for VMware Inc. to run its software on AWS.

Connolly conceded that the new service also competes with AWS’s own Elastic MapReduce service but he claims Hortonworks’ service is more enterprise-oriented. “I view AWS as an opportunity to bring our solution to the market and bring in a whole new revenue stream,” he said. “This is for customers that have already chosen AWS.”

After struggling with sales issues earlier this year, Hortonworks turned in a better-than-expected third quarter last week, though it’s still losing money. Chief Executive Rob Bearden said the company was making progress in its cloud-based services as 25 percent of its customers now use Hortonworks in the cloud. “We view cloud as an onramp” to on-premises Hortonworks software, he said.

The Hortonworks service will be available through the AWS Marketplace as an hourly pay-as-you-go service costing about 10 to 60 cents an hour, or annually for a yet-undisclosed price.

Connolly spoke with SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit theCUBE in September at BigDataNYC, providing more details about the connected data architecture linking its software in data centers and the cloud:

Photo by SiliconANGLE