Hortonworks and Cloudera Have Merged: How It Impacts You

On October 3^rd, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced their merger, a huge and highly significantly announcement in the big data space. Big data has slowed down since some of its hype passed by and really left only two big players in the market, Cloudera and Hortonworks. Both companies are known for reducing the complexity of Hadoop and implementing a Hadoop ecosystem in your organization. They have packaged it up for IT departments who wanted a big data ecosystem but didn’t want the hassle of open-source Hadoop along the way.

With the current trend of cloud-based big data solutions are quickly taking over the market place, including Azure, AWS and Google, Cloudera and Hortonworks were left playing catch-up. Being able to deploy into a cloud environment is now a critical capability for these on-premises organizations to complete. Both companies have moved to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud models, but Azure services like Azure Data Lake, Data Bricks and Azure Data Warehouse are capturing much high customer volumes and getting faster adoption.

Hortonworks is an open-source play for solving Hadoop issues making everything inter-operable, Cloudera has open source components giving them more control over the user experience and functionality. The greatest way this merger will impact customers is by combining Hortonworks investments in end-to-end data management and Cloudera’s investment in data warehousing and machine learning. They are now going to be able to deliver an enterprise data cloud, from the edge all the way up to AI.

While exciting, this leaves a lot of unanswered questions.  Microsoft Azure already provides an enterprise data cloud, so this means that they will now be in direct competition with each other. A lot is unclear at this point, including what the brand will be called and how they plan to compete with the rapid-adoption of these cloud big data companies. We should know more within the next few weeks, and as Pragmatic Works is a partner with both Hortonworks and Cloudera, we can help you navigate this time of transition. We are also covering these topics in our Azure Data Week.