For its part, Hortonworks is working closely with Microsoft on its big data initiatives.

"This is a joint engineering effort," explains John Kreisa, vice president of marketing for Hortonworks. "This is an engineering relationship in which our engineers have been working with Microsoft engineers in porting Hadoop, which is traditional Linux infrastructure, over to Windows."

"Hortonworks and Microsoft share a very common and aligned view on the Hadoop technology, the strategy and the evolution of this market," Leland adds. "Hortonworks is the only provider of Hadoop that is committed to delivering a 100 percent open source distribution of Apache Hadoop-no proprietary code-and that, as we came out earlier in the process, was an absolute stated direction for Microsoft. We have a commitment on our part to contribute back all the code that we build to the open source community. Given that alignment and approach, Hortonworks was really the natural partner for us."

For now, both flavors of HDInsight are in preview and free to use. Leland says Microsoft is encouraging customers to use the previews and help it round out the offering before its commercial launch.