Hortonwork Inc.’s latest acquisition is bound to make some waves in the industry. The purchase follows the same pattern as the previous two, a small startup that has been in operation for barely a few quarters, but the technology Onyara, Inc. is commercializing dates back nearly a decade to the National Security Agency.

Development on what is now known as Apache Nifi started in 2006 as a response to the spread of connected devices at the edge of the network and the wave of unstructured data that followed suite, which proved too much for traditional aggregation techniques. The NSA needed a way to pull that information into its facilities fast, securely and in a way that allows for rapid filtering when needed.

The project was polished and refined internally for the better part of nine years before being finally released to the open-source community a few months ago as part of the agency’s Technology Transfer Program, which aims to make its innovations available for the private sector. The engineers who developed Nifi founded Onyara around the same time to hurry adoption along.

Joining up with Hortonworks should help the 10-person team work towards their goal much faster on the back of its open-source Hadoop distribution. The Hortonworks Data Platform is one of the fastest growing commercial flavors of the analytics engine, which is in turn the de facto platform for processing the kind of real-time transmissions Nifi was developed to handle.

One of the main features that help the project stand out is the ability to prioritize streams, which the NSA employed to ensure critical intelligence doesn’t get stuck waiting for less important information to clear the network before arriving to its destination. Commercial organizations can put that functionality to use for their own mission-critical data.

An oil company, for instance, could take advantage of Nifi to quickly route sensory information indicating an imminent equipment failure on an offshore rig to the local maintenance personnel before any harm can be done. And a marketing analytics provider would be able to identify leads equally fast before the window to make a sale closes.

Now armed with the talent that produced the technology making all of that possible, Hortonworks will offer a commercial version of Nifi called Dataflow on a subscription basis to users of its Hadoop distribution. The service joins the access control software gained through its acquisition of XA Secure Inc. which was open-sourced shortly after the deal, and SequenceIQ Inc.’s automated deployment engine.

Photo via Geralt