Today Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital announced the formation of Hortonworks. Hortonworks is a new, independent company founded based on the Apache Hadoop technology pioneered at Yahoo!. The formation of Hortonworks increases investment in the development of Apache Hadoop and will accelerate adoption by making it more robust and easier to install, manage and use for enterprises and technology vendors. This investment will enable Apache Hadoop to meet the growing market demand and become the big data management and analysis platform of choice for the industry.

Apache Hadoop is the open source technology at the epicenter of big data and cloud computing. It enables organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, process, manage and analyze the ever-increasing volume of data being created and collected every day.
Hadoop has been and will continue to be an important area of focus for Yahoo!. We will continue to innovate with Hadoop, co-developing core Hadoop code with Hortonworks and moving forward with our own development efforts as we continue to leverage this technology to power our business.

Read more about it in the press release and the blog from Raymie Stata, Yahoo! CTO.