Cloudera & Hortonworks Merge Completed

The US-based enterprise data cloud company, Cloudera, Inc. announced on Thursday in a Press Release the completion of its merger with Hortonworks, Inc. (a rival company). This is the close of the 3, October 2018 definitive agreement, under which the companies will combine in an all-stock merger of equals.

Under the terms of the merger agreement, Cloudera stockholders will own approximately 60% of the equity of the combined company and Hortonworks stockholders will own approximately 40%. Also the name of the combined entity was set as “Cloudera”. The companies here commercialize the Hadoop open-source big data software, which companies can use to store, process and analyze lots of different types of data.

Cloudera said it will deliver the first enterprise data cloud – unlocking the power of any data, running in any cloud from the Edge to AI, on a 100% open-source data platform. An enterprise data cloud supports both hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, providing enterprises with the flexibility to perform machine learning and analytics with their data, their way, with no lock-in.

The success story of this merge started immediately after the announcement in October 2018 when Cloudera stock sky-rocketed to 25 percent on same day while Hortonworks stock was halted just prior to the announcement and rose as much as 29 percent when it resumed trading.

“Today, we start an exciting new chapter for Cloudera as we become the leading enterprise data cloud provider,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera in the press release. “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.” He added.

These merge now result to partners joining forces to challenge their major however, leading competitor Amazon whose competitive products include Elastic MapReduce (EMR), for data storage and processing, and Redshift, a data warehouse system. Amazon on its own end has been investing heavily on database and that may widen the gap for Cloudera.

Further on the press release, a leading independent research firm Forrester noted that, “this merger…will raise the bar on innovation in the big data space, especially in supporting an end-to-end big data strategy in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment. We believe that it’s a win-win situation for customers, partners, and the vendors.”

Cloudera will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “CLDR.” Hortonworks stockholders received 1.305 common shares of Cloudera for each share of Hortonworks stock owned.

 

The announcement was drawn to an end with an invitation to a virtual event on January 10, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET hosted by Cloudera executives  – to discuss how the new Cloudera is poised to accelerate innovation and deliver the industry’s first enterprise data cloud.