The bulked-up company hopes to be better equipped to fend off competition from Amazon, Microsoft and others.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

January 3, 2019

2 Min Read
Cloudera & Hortonworks Close Merger, Aim to Build Cloud Analytics Muscle

Enterprise data analytics provider Cloudera has completed its merger with competitor Hortonworks, the company said Thursday. The new Cloudera will focus on delivering analytics from any cloud, from the edge to core, using artificial intelligence and 100% open source.

The two companies announced their merger in October. Once fierce rivals, their bigger problem now is competition from industry giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), as well as specialized startups such as Databricks and Snowflake. (See Behind the Cloudera-Hortonworks Merger: 'The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend'.)

Cloudera and Hortonworks have complementary strengths -- Cloudera with machine learning and AI, and Hortonworks with edge and IoT. Indeed, the short statement from Cloudera Inc. announcing the merger Wednesday twice uses the phrase "from the edge to AI" (which doesn't actually make sense but yeah, whatever, two buzzwords in five words so I guess that's a marketing win).

Figure 1: Photo by CEBIT Australia (CC BY-ND 2.0) Photo by CEBIT Australia (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Though Cloudera is billing the deal as a merger of equals; Cloudera stockholders get about 60% of the new company, with Hortonworks stockholders having the remainder. Tom Reilly, CEO of the old Cloudera, will continue as boss of the combined company. And the new Cloudera has about $720 million in revenue with more than 2,500 customers.

Cloudera touts its unique support for all four of the major cloud providers -- Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM. And it also supports on-premises data analytics, providing hybrid cloud support that its bigger public cloud competitors lack, executives say.

At about the same time Cloudera and Hortonworks announced their merger plans in October, Cloudera competitor Snowflake announced a $450 million funding round. (See Snowflake Closes $450M Funding for Cloud Data Warehousing.)

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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