Hortonworks
More info
- Creator
- Eric Baldeschwieler and others, spun out of Yahoo
- Released
- 2011
- Type
- Hadoop distributor
- Successor
- Cloudera (merger, 2019)
The Hadoop company Yahoo spun out with its own engineers, which ended up merging with its fiercest rival eight years later.
Yahoo was the biggest contributor to Hadoop, and in 2011 a couple of dozen of its developers left to form Hortonworks. The name comes from Horton, the elephant in the Dr. Seuss book — a nod to Hadoop's elephant logo. Unlike Cloudera, its HDP distribution was entirely open source; revenue came from support contracts.
The company went public in 2014, at the height of the era when every large enterprise needed a data lake. Then the cloud providers started selling the same thing by the hour, and in January 2019 Hortonworks and Cloudera merged under the Cloudera name. Two rivals fighting over a shrinking market usually end up that way.