"Hadoop is the platform we run the company on. It's at the core of what we do," said Todd Papaioannou, Yahoo's vice president of cloud computing, in an interview with IDG last month. Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Doug Cutting, the creator of Hadoop, joined Yahoo in 2006 to help the company develop the technology. He is now with Cloudera, which distributes a version of Hadoop. The Apache Foundation oversees Hadoop, , though Yahoo contributes a sizeable portion of the new code for the project.

Designating its Hadoop team as its own entity makes sense for Yahoo, Hadapt's Borgman noted. Yahoo is primarily an Internet media company, and the market for Hadoop would be enterprises, a market Yahoo does not currently cater to.

"Maybe they feel that by spinning it out in a different company, it will have a better opportunity to pursue a different line of business," Borgman said.

Should the spin-off take place, the new entity would be one of a growing number of companies supporting Hadoop. Cloudera offers its own . DataStax paired with its Cassandra data store. IBM Hadoop into its analytics offerings, and even used the framework Watson Jeopardy-playing supercomputer.