Hortonworks and Cloudera Set to Merge
In the world of Hadoop big data, Hortonworks and Cloudera have been going head to head in a highly competitive market — but no more.
In a surprise announcement on Oct. 3, the two erstwhile rivals announced they would merge to make their respective big platforms even bigger.
The deal has been positioned by the two companies as an all-stock merger of equals, though Cloudera will be more equal than Hortonworks. Under the terms of the deal, Cloudera shareholders will own 60 percent of the equity of the combined company, while Hortonworks shareholders will have 40 percent. Cloudera has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol CLDR, while Hortonworks is listed on NASDAQ as HDP.
“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,” Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at Cloudera, stated. “This vision will enable our companies to advance our shared commitment to customer success in their pursuit of digital transformation.”
Hortonworks' CEO Rob Bearden sees the merger as an opportunity to develop enhanced offerings.
“This compelling merger will create value for our respective stockholders and allow customers, partners, employees and the open source community to benefit from the enhanced offerings, larger scale and improved cost competitiveness inherent in this combination,” Bearden wrote in a statement.
After the merger is completed during the first quarter of calendar 2019, Reilly will become CEO of the combined company, and Bearden will join the combined board of directors. While Reilly and Bearden see the merger with Hortonworks as being complementary, there is likely to be a significant amount of overlap in terms of the two companies' respective products. Both have core platforms based on Hadoop and both have been active contributors to Hadoop-related efforts within the open source Apache Software Foundation.
One thing is for sure, with over 2,500 customers, the combined company will be a dominant player in the big data landscape.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
