Last month, Cloudera, Inc. and Hortonworks, Inc. announced the two companies will merge. The story is still developing, but it’s a familiar story of two competitors getting merged. What is unknown is the outcome: what will happen to customers and partners of both companies?
Who’s on First?
Cloudera and Hortonworks are major players in the big data space. Both are Hadoop distributions – they have built their stack on the base Apache Hadoop. They have their own customers, and there are reasons why customers have chosen one distribution over the other.
As an open source offering, Hadoop has not been easy to implement. Both Cloudera and Hortonworks built all sorts of tools and customized Hadoop, rebranded it and sold their platforms as big data packages.
What’s on Second?
There are a lot of similarities between the two companies. But, how will they deliver the combined platform? From a technology standpoint, are they going to support both frameworks? Will it be a combination of components from both vendors? Are they going to integrate the frameworks, or will one platform take precedence?
I Don’t Know is on Third
What about customers? What happens to them? Take a large customer that is dependent on the Hortonworks stack. The combined Cloudera/Hortonworks company may say, “Don’t worry. We will handle the migration.” This is great news from a data standpoint. But, what about products that are running on top of Hortonworks? All bets are off when it comes to answering the question, “Will this product work on the new Cloudera/Hortonworks combined platform?” The answer is most definitely: NO.
A Home Run for Data Democracy
As a visionary, Gurucul decided not to be reliant on any one big data platform from the very beginning. We made this decision because we knew that your backend underlying data layer could change at any time. And, we wanted to be able to support any data lake – which is how we’ve always positioned our platform, Gurucul Risk Analytics. In the wake of the current news, our decision to offer open choice of big data is a huge win for our customers.
Nilesh Dherange, CTO of Gurucul points out, “For us, it doesn’t matter what the underlying big data platform is – we work on any big data platform.”
Being data agnostic and offering open choice of big data is proving to be a critical differentiator in today’s world. Data democracy has never been more important. No matter what happens with the Cloudera and Hortonworks merger, Gurucul has your back – your backend data lake, that is!