Several leading US hosting and cloud infrastructure service providers have partnered with Cloudera, provider of a leading Apache Hadoop distribution, to develop public-cloud Hadoop services.

The providers joining Cloudera's Connect: Cloud program are Verizon, CenturyLink-owned Savvis, IBM's SoftLayer and T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

Tim Stevens, VP of corporate and business development at Cloudera, said the Cloud will have a big role in the future of the enterprise. “We remain committed to solving higher order big data problems for our customers that will enable them to ask bigger questions and derive more sophisticated insights from their data – wherever it lives – from a single, unified enterprise data management platform.”

The program's goal is to give customers flexibility in deployment, consumption and choice of vendor when setting up big data analytics environments based on the open-source Hadoop framework.

Amr Awadallah, Cloudera's CTO, said, “For Hadoop to transition into the mainstream, enterprises need to have the flexibility and freedom to utilize the underlying infrastructure that best suits their specific needs, rather than having their data management solution provider be the gatekeeper of an on-premises versus cloud decision.”

Cloudera also plans to provide support for customer deployments in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in the near future, as well as private cloud deployments through OpenStack and VMware. The company's long-term vision is to embrace a hybrid model, where the Cloudera stack can operate transparently between on-premises, private cloud and public cloud deployments.