The latest iteration of Teradata Corp.’s Hadoop appliance is making its official debut this morning with several major surprises, the biggest of which is the landmark addition of support for Cloudera Inc.’s popular distribution of the analytics framework. The update is the latest in the company’s efforts to diversify beyond its traditional data warehousing business.

The campaign has seen Teradata make no fewer than four strategic acquisitions in recent months to bolster its software arsenal. While spread out over different segments and stages of development, all of the startups caught up in its spending spree offered niche functionality to complement Hadoop.

That pattern mirrors the company’s aspirations of  becoming something of a value-added provider in a position to serve customers of all three major distributions, which is also the motive behind the decision to integrate the newest release of Cloudera’s Hadoop version into the appliance. The more flavors are supported, the wider the range of potential buyers becomes.

Up until now, Teradata’s appliance – now in its fifth incarnation – only provided integration with the rivaling distribution from Hortonworks Inc., which was the first among the top distributors to hit the stock exchange and is widely seen as the community favorite but still only accounts for only a fraction of the market. That arithmetic will likely lead the company throw in support for MapR’s version as well later  down the road.

With the shift from traditional data warehouses to modern alternatives such as Hadoop already starting to take its toll on Teradata’s bottom line, that likely to happen sooner rather than later. The company is also bolstering the other parts of its arsenal in conjunction, most recently launching commercial support services for the Presto engine and laying out a plan to increase the appeal of the free SQL-on-Hadoop engine with new features and integrations.

Photo via Steven Kreuzer