Cloudera and Hortonworks Announce $ 5.2 Billion Merger – TechCrunch



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Over the years, Hadoop, the former high-performance open-source platform has spawned many businesses and an ecosystem of suppliers has emerged. It was long thought that some big companies would stand out, and of course Hortonworks went public in 2014. Cloudera followed three years later, but the market slowed down and the two companies announced today their merger in a transaction of $ 5.2 billion, based on the price of closing yesterday.

Part of the problem with Hadoop, even though everyone could download it, was its complexity. That's where companies such as Hortonworks and Cloudera came in. They were designed for IT departments who wanted a large data processing platform, but did not necessarily want to create Hadoop from scratch. nothing.

These companies offered different ways to tackle this complexity, but over time, with all the cloud-based Big Data solutions, deploying a Hadoop system seemed unnecessary, even with the help of companies like Cloudera. and Hortonworks.

Photo: Garrett Heath on Flickr. Used under CC by 2.0 license.

In an interview in 2017, Carl Olofson, an analyst at IDC, described the differences between the two companies, which could now help them become one company:

Olofson has described Hortonworks as a "pure open source company," which bundles, coordinates, and manages this open source as a subscription-based product, and also sells support. he [said] The company's products are primarily intended for "large data technologists".

Cloudera is a little different, he said. "[It] offers mainly open source packages, but with proprietary tools for various categories of business problems. They sell to business leaders. Their approach is therefore different and, as a result, they generate a higher percentage of their software revenue than Hortonworks, "Olofson told TechCrunch.

Sometimes the best solution to a fragmented market is meeting, and that's exactly what both companies have done today. The transaction involves a merger of all shares in which each partner becomes the equal owner, according to a statement announcing the transaction.

Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, certainly sees the two companies as complementary, offering customers something different that they could not separate. "Our activities are highly complementary and strategic. By combining Hortonworks' investments in end-to-end data management with Cloudera's investments in data warehousing and machine learning, we will deliver the industry's first business data cloud, from Edge to AI. " said Reilly in a statement.

As you can imagine, Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden agreed. "This irresistible merger will create value for our respective shareholders and enable customers, partners, employees and the open source community to benefit from enhanced, larger and more competitive offerings. -increased costs associated with this combination, "he said.

The combined businesses will have 2,500 customers, revenues of $ 720 million and cash of $ 500 million debt free, according to the two companies.

Cloudera, founded in 2008, has raised more than one billion dollars before becoming public, the vast majority coming from Intel Capital in 2014, including 740 million USD. Hortonworks, founded three years later, raised $ 248 million.

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