How Cloudera and Hortonworks became the Multi-Cloud Data Management Provider?

At the end of the year 2018, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced their merger of $5.2 billion, becoming the second largest open source software company in the world. Previously, both Cloudera and Hortonworks were one of the leading big data technology providers and with this merger, it is aimed to become the top choice for enterprise big data analytics.

Cloudera and Hortonworks, now renamed as Cloudera, is expected to increase their customer reach and pave the path for innovations in data management, machine learning and artificial intelligence. This merger is a welcome advantage for all the enterprises that have been using Cloudera and Hortonworks separately.

With the unified benefits of the best of Cloudera and Hortonworks on a single platform, now enterprises have more options for useful data analysis and data management.

Highlights of the Merger Between Cloudera and Hortonworks

• Laying the foundation for the massive future expansions and introducing innovative developments in big data analytics.
• Creation of an advanced version of a big data platform that helps to govern the tools for AI and machine learning.
• Ease in providing a highly scalable platform with an array of excellent resources required for any big data operations.
• Accelerate innovations in implementing innovative practices for IoT, AI, machine learning and data management capabilities with the combined offerings of Cloudera and Hortonworks.
• Ability to position itself as the number one enterprise data cloud provider; standing as the strong competition to Amazon’s similar enterprise data services.
• Better expansion of opportunities and the ability to reach out to more customers.
• Better customer satisfaction with all the essential resources needed for any big data analysis.
• Good positioning in the market for a data cloud provider for enterprises and a combined customer base.
• Increased financial benefits with improved margin profile with around $750 million in revenue.
• Advantages for all stakeholders, partners, vendors and customers as both the platforms have been the top rivals previously in the big data space.
• Bringing a comprehensive solution for data analytics with some of the advanced features ever seen in the industry.

How Did This Merger Happen?

Before we dwell on how this merger could influence the big data industry, let’s see why this merger was formed in the first place.

Till a few years back, Hadoop was known to be one of the major cloudera service providers in the world. Hadoop was used by a majority of enterprises in the time when the uses of big data were just discovered.

However, soon with the introduction of several cloud and data analytics platforms available at affordable rates with similar functionalities, Hadoop started to dwindle. Adding to it, there were high costs associated with data storage on Hadoop which made most enterprises look for new options.

During this time, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and a lot other major companies introduced their data platforms which further pushed Hadoop back. This resulted in a considerable change in the market share.

Though the executives stayed away from mentioning such reasons behind the merger, the top industry experts pointed out this as the major reason why the merger came into existence.

What Does This Merger Mean for Big Data?

Cloudera, the product of Cloudera-Hortonworks merger, is a 100% open-source data platform that can run on any cloud platform and is now available with many integration options accumulated from Cloudera and Hortonworks. This enterprise cloud platform opens up the options for flexibility enabling the users to work in a hybrid or a multi-cloud environment.

The big data industry has been crowded with many service providers for specific big data functions and this merger is expected to lead over several such competitions. Customers have double the benefit of using the merged Cloudera platform with resources from each of the two platforms available together.

Though this merger could further dampen the Hadoop in the big data ecosystem, both the companies are in agreement that they cannot do with it.

While previously, Cloudera had Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Navigator, Apache Sentry, Apache Spark and Apache Impala on the respective territories, Hortonworks used an entirely different set of resources – Atlas, Ambari, Ranger, Hive and Tez. All of these resources will be available on the newly-merged Cloudera platform which allows the users to exercise freedom in working and managing their data pipeline.

The new Cloudera will drive significant business transformations in providing end-to-end big data innovative products for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Customers can use the public cloud platform just like their own data centers. They can access the data anywhere from any kind of device with the Cloudera architecture.

The Cloudera-Hortonworks merger will create a modern cloud platform that provides some of the world’s innovative data engineering, data warehousing and data analytics to build and implement AI, machine learning and IoT applications through the public cloud, data center and edge.