The world of large-scale analytics became a lot more competitive last week as the two sides of the battle over enterprise spending augmented their respective technologies. Hortonworks Inc. fired off the first shot with the acquisition of another partner meant to help organizations deploy their number-crunching clusters more easily.

The technology that the Hadoop distributor is gaining through the purchase of the Budapest-based SequenceIO Inc. automates much of the work involved in implementing the notoriously unwieldy analytics framework on public clouds. The software also promises to simplify the process of adding more capacity from there onward, which is often no less complicated.

The acquisition will help Hortonworks to put up a better fight in the public cloud, where its Hadoop version is facing competition not only from rival distributors but also the proprietary camp of the analytics war, which has the home advantage on that front. Google expanded that edge in the wake of Hortonworks’ acquisition by making the analytics service that it’s developing on top of its infrastructure-as-a-service platform publicly accessible.

The service stands out from Hadoop in its ability to support the execution of batch and real-time analysis using the same relatively straightforward syntax, which not only simplifies writing queries but also developing applications to take advantage of the functionality. That’s a highly appealing value proposition for the majority of organizations that can’t afford to run their dedicated analytics clusters on a large scale, but Google’s path to victory is far from assured.

The search giant is covering the entire Hadoop universe, including both the top three distributions with their more than one billion dollars in combined funding and their surrounding ecosystem of partners, which boasts a formidable pot of its own. Pepperdata Inc. added more to the pile last week after closing a $15 million investment from Wing Venture Capital and existing backers to help drive the adoption of its clustering component for the batch processing framework.

The proprietary engine is touted as a smarter alternative to the free alternatives in the open-source ecosystem, YARN and Mesos, that provides capabilities for prioritizing workloads based on importance. The new capital infusion will help Pepperdata extend that functionality beyond Hadoop to other applications and grow its global presence.

Image via Pixabay