Big Data Companies Cloudera, Hortonworks Complete Merger

Big data companies Cloudera and Hortonworks are starting 2019 as a combined entity, completing their merger on Thursday, Jan. 3, to fuel significant growth of big data management market share where Amazon and MapR are also players.

The merger was completed within the expected 90-day timeframe after the deal was first announced in October. The fast track is a good thing for investors, who saw the two big data companies being treated as a single entity in the market, with mixed reviews on Hortonworks in the third-quarter dragging down Cloudera stock.

After years of going head-to-head in the market, the combined company will be able to “fuel innovation at a greater rate and pace than” was possible as two separate big data companies, Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said in its earnings call last month.

The outcome of this innovation, according to Reilly, is its enterprise data cloud, a hybrid and multi-cloud-friendly data and analytics offering that supports AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle.

“We aim to bring the right data analytics to data anywhere the enterprise needs to work. The emergence of new open source standards, including Kubernetes and container technology, will play a significant role in this strategy, enabling the separation of computer and storage and cloud-like architectures that customers can run anywhere,” Reilly said.

“As one company, we will also spark new growth by investing in the unified platform that spans the edge to AI broadening the breadth of use cases we support in expanding the markets we serve,” he said. “We'll blend the strongest elements of each company's technology in this new platform and cross-sell the products that are represented a competitive advantage for our respective companies.”

While Cloudera focused its investments on recent years in machine learning and AI, Hortonworks focused on real-time streaming and data ingest, offering support for IOT use cases at the edge, Reilly said. These areas complement each other and will help the combined entity increase the use cases it enables; it will also bring new cross-sell opportunities forward, the first of which is a plan to sell Hortonworks edge offering to Cloudera customers.

In October Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna called the deal a win-win for customers, partners, and the vendors themselves. By teaming up, Cloudera and Hortonworks will be able to offer end-to-end support for multi-cloud, Yuhanna noted, along with strong cross-sell opportunities.

Cloudera went public in 2017, and the combined company will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CLDR." For each share of Hortonworks stock owned, shareholders were awarded 1.305 common shares of Cloudera.

"Today, we start an exciting new chapter for Cloudera as we become the leading enterprise data cloud provider," Reilly said in a statement. "This combined team and technology portfolio establish the new Cloudera as a clear market leader with the scale and resources to drive continued innovation and growth. We will provide customers a comprehensive solution-set to bring the right data analytics to data anywhere the enterprise needs to work, from the Edge to AI, with the industry's first Enterprise Data Cloud."