Longtime rivals Hadoop development rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks decide to lay down arms and join forces with the announcement of a $5.2 billion merger promising to bring about a unified version of the big data processing platform.
“Our businesses are highly complementary and strategic. By bringing together Hortonworks’ investments in end-to-end data management with Cloudera’s investments in data warehousing and machine learning, we will deliver the industry’s first enterprise data cloud from the Edge to AI," Cloudera says. "This vision will enable our companies to advance our shared commitment to customer success in their pursuit of digital transformation.”
Released back in 2011 as an open source project, Hadoop is freely available for all to download and work on. However not everyone is able to deal with the sheer complexity of the platform, bringing about further development form the likes of Hortonworks and Cloudera. The two companies offer different ways to deal with Hadoop, even if currently the platform is under attack from cloud-based big data rivals.
The rivalry from the cloud explains the merger-- the two companies now want to establish a "next generation data platform leader with increased scale and resources to deliver the industry’s first enterprise data cloud, providing the ease of use and elasticity of the public cloud from the data center, to the Edge and everywhere in between." To do so, Cloudera-Hortonworks will create a unified platform and industry standard from the Edge to AI, while working on complementary offerings such as Hortonworks DataFlow and Cloudera Data Science Workbench.
Under the terms of the merger, Cloudera owns a 60% of the combined company, with Hortonworks owning the rest. Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly owns the company, while Hortonworks COO Scott Davidson serves as COO. The two companies will also further combine both leadership and board, at least once the transaction goes through US antitrust clearance and other closing conditions.
