Cloudera and Amazon have joined forces to democratize Hadoop in the latest push to converge cloud computing and analytics, two of the hottest and most disruptive trends in IT. The pair announced the collaboration this morning, just days after Impala – Cloudera’s open source query engine for unstructured information – launched on Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

For customers, this partnership removes the large upfront capital investment needed to build and maintain an on-premise Hadoop cluster. The Enterprise edition of Cloudera’s distro can be deployed in the cloud on a subscription basis much faster and cheaper than cobbling together a sufficiently scalable Big Data platform and bringing in the necessary talent to extract value from that investment.

“Our customers run Cloudera’s Enterprise Data Hub in AWS for a variety of reasons,” says Tushar Shanbhag, Director, Products at Cloudera. “Some of these include, data arriving real-time in S3 from customer application themselves or their partners. This data is then processed, curated, analyzed and served in real-time in AWS itself, thereby accelerating their time to insight. This is a fairly common pattern among our enterprise customers who use long-running Cloudera Enterprise clusters in AWS for continuous processed and real-time serving.”

Cloudera and Amazon are touting all the regular benefits of the cloud, including cost efficiency, rapid provisioning and accelerated time-to-market. The companies are targeting traditional enterprises that may not be willing to move their mission critical workloads into the cloud just yet, but still need a way to harness the flood of data from external sources. With shadow IT continuing to drive SaaS adoption and analytics playing an increasingly important role in decision making, this market has a bright outlook heading into 2014.

Tim Steves, the head of corporate and business development at Cloudera, remarked that “while on-premises data management deployments continue to be an option for some enterprises, others prefer the flexibility and economics of the cloud. A data management solution shouldn’t dictate where and how they store their data — the solution should go to the data.”

“Enterprises can deploy and operate a comprehensive, fully operational enterprise data hub in the cloud, which provides powerful, flexible, scalable and cost efficient data storage, processing and analytics,” he said.