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Main Hadoop Developers – Hortonworks and Cloudera – Under One Roof

Hadoop is listed as an open-source Apache project, however, the main commercial distribution packages were coming from Hortonworks and Cloudera. It happened so that most of Hadoop original developers went to Hortonworks, while one of the main co-creators – Doug Cutting – joined Cloudera.

For almost eight years the two companies rivaled with each other for a reason that does not seem to be a valid cause for a rivalry:

• Hortonworks was trying to prove that the purity of the open-source idea is of utmost importance and all development efforts should focus on code improvement to increase processing speed, scalability, efficiency, etc. (from a meeting with co-founder Alan Gates in 2014).
• Cloudera focused on packaging Hadoop into an “enterprise wrapper” with features that facilitate adoption of any software – administrative controls, metadata manager, data catalog, etc.

Now, the two teams are one company.

Our Take

This merger had been long overdue. A viable software platform has to evolve along both its performance metrics and its usability index. Hadoop users will definitely benefit from the merger as the product should be improving faster without any waste of resources on rivalry. It could be just a little too late – too many Hadoop competitors have sprung onto the market, but there’s still hope as the market for big data software is still growing fast.