For years, Cloudera and Hortonworks have offered competing distributions of the Hadoop open source big data framework. Now the companies plan to merge. Although the deal was billed as a “merger of equals,” Cloudera shareholders will own 60 percent of the new company, and Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, will become CEO of the combined company. Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, will serve on the company’s board, and some other Hortonworks’ execs will have C-level positions.
Together, the companies will have $720 million in revenue, more than 2,500 customers and about $500 million in cash. They predict sales of $1 billion by 2020. They have not said what the new company will be called.
Both Cloudera and Hortonworks were founded by people who helped create Hadoop while working at Yahoo. The two companies have continued to work together on the open source Hadoop project while competing fiercely in the marketplace.
