Did the public clouds kill Hadoop?

The big players in the Hadoop data analytics market continue to face a rapidly evolving market, which now includes competition from Amazon Web Services and leading cloud providers offering businesses management services and analyzing huge amounts of data generated. .

It was less than a week ago, MapR Technologies, which, along with Cloudera and Hortonworks, had been the main driver of the commercialization of Hadoop open source technology over the last ten years, said it was only only a few weeks before the closure of its operations and the dismissal of more than 120 employees. unless the company can finance more or find a buyer.

Now, Cloudera, which has finalized its $ 5.2 billion merger with Hortonworks in the hope of creating a larger, stronger company to compete with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, is tossed in tumultuous waters. after poor results, disappointing financial forecasts for the rest of the year, and the retirement of chief executive Tom Reilly were announced this week. All this news has put the Cloudera stock in a free fall, with a drop of more than 40% at the time of going to press.

Both Cloudera and MapR are experiencing the effects of a rapidly changing data analysis space as companies choose to manage, store and analyze their data in the cloud rather than Assume the costs and headaches associated with this on-site operation. Companies also use a multitude of other databases in memory and accelerated, as well as storing objects, while before they might have opted for Hadoop and its HDFS file system . At the same time, Cloudera and MapR are challenged to try to produce and monetize platforms based on open source technology. These difficulties manifested themselves in the financial figures of the companies, which had a training effect across the organizations.

On May 13, MapR's founder, president and CEO, John Schroeder, told employees and representatives of the state of California and the city of Santa Clara that a The chain reaction of bad news put society in a dire situation that could shut down. MapR, which had raised more than $ 280 million since its launch in 2009 and remained private, was about to embark on the debt financing process, which would have eased its financial difficulties and allowed it to continue. its activities in the near future. The transaction was about to be finalized – funding was scheduled for May or June – when the first quarter of MapR figures will be entered.

In his letter, Schroeder called the first quarter results "disappointing" and "unexpected", adding that he did not quite understand the reasons for these poor numbers. However, he said that "they were at least partly due to the sudden, unexpected and unexpected postponement of several customers' time to make a purchase decision".

After the publication of these figures, MapR was trading with the withdrawal of debt financing, leaving the supplier in a difficult financial situation. Schroeder wrote that unless you invest more or find a buyer by June 14, the activities of MapR, which counts among its customers as important companies as Audi, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and UnitedHealthcare, would stop. He added that the company's board of directors was reviewing letters of intent from two different organizations at the time, but did not specify what they were.

The mix of customers withdrawing their purchases and the poor financial results of the first quarter have a similar impact on Cloudera, which has 929 customers. The company recorded a $ 35 million operating loss in the quarter and anticipates continued losses throughout the year. Although the quarterly figures are slightly above the expectations of financial analysts, forecasts for the rest of the year have raised concerns.

Cloudera was also taken into account by other factors, which led to a slowdown in bookings during the quarter, which represent more than 90% of the company's usual growth, Reilly said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts. The merger with Hortonworks "has created uncertainty, particularly with respect to the combined company's roadmap, which we deployed in March of this year," he said. "During this period of uncertainty, we have seen increased competition from public cloud providers."

In addition, Cloudera announced in March its Cloudera data platform, a hybrid, multi-layered cloud offering that Reilly believes will expand from the data center to the cloud and the edge, enabling customers to companies better manage their workloads in artificial intelligence and move them more easily from one site to another. to another, whether in the cloud or in the data center. Features include Smart Migration, which will use rule-based controls to automate the movement of data and workloads between private clouds and local cloud-based stores, as well as the cloud break in the cloud. analytic workloads in public clouds. There will also be an adaptive scaling to automatically adjust cloud resources based on demand.

"Large global companies have complex use cases requiring multiple analytical functions," Reilly said. "These companies need hybrid cloud services to have data and workloads in their data centers and in the public cloud. What they are asking for is the ability to transparently move their data workloads to the optimal locations to reduce costs and maximize efficiency. They also want a consistent model for security, governance, compliance and management. Finally, they plan to use multiple public clouds and open source software to avoid blocking providers. We believe that CDP uniquely responds to all the requirements of these customers. "

One problem is that some customers refrain from renewing or expanding their contracts until the platform becomes available, first in the form of a hybrid software as a service (SaaS) offering the public cloud this summer and later in the year for private clouds.

It remains to be seen to what extent the new Cloudera data platform will help the company compete with AWS. Cloudera and MapR have both grown beyond the mere offering of Hadoop platforms in the hope of competing with the competition in a world of increasingly cloud and data centric. Both have embraced Spark in memory processing, Docker containers, Kubernetes container management, and other emerging technologies to create larger platforms for gathering data from multiple sources. The Cloudera data platform is a continuation of the company's strategy in public clouds and in specific workloads such as machine learning.

Following the merger with Hortonworks, Cloudera recently previewed a Kubernetes-based cloud machine learning platform, Cloudera Machine Learning, that provides a unified data access experience in cloud-based environments. on-site, public and hybrid, and Cloudera Edge Management and Cloudera. Flow Management, both for developers and architects of the Internet of Things (IoT).

However, they face big hyperscalarists well funded and with their own solutions. AWS offers a range of services to help organizations manage and analyze huge amounts of data, including Kinesis Data Stream, Lambda, and DynamoDB, while Azure includes SQL Data Warehouse, Data Factory , Databricks and Cosmos DB.

Reilly will leave Cloudera on July 31st. While Cloudera is looking for another CEO, Martin Cole, chairman of the board, will assume the role of interim CEO.