Cloudera and Hortonworks in $7.3bn merger

Two of the largest commercial players in the Hadoop big data space, Cloudera and Hortonworks, have unveiled plans for a US$5.2 billion ($7.3 billion) “merger of equals”.

The merger has the backing of both vendors’ boards and will create an enormous player in the open source big data space.

Under the terms of the transaction agreement, Cloudera stockholders will own approximately 60 percent of the equity of the combined company and Hortonworks stockholders will own the remaining 40 percent.

Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said in a statement that the two companies were “highly complementary”.

“By bringing together 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 enterprise data cloud from the edge to AI,” Reilly said.

The merger is expected to give the combined entity about US$720m in revenue and over 2500 customers.

Reilly will serve as CEO of the new entity, while Hortonworks’ current COO Scott Davidson and chief product officer Arun Murthy will transition across and keep their same titles.

Hortonworks’ current CEO Rob Bearden will join the board of directors.

The two companies expect to complete the transaction during the first quarter of calendar year 2019.