Today’s topics include Cloudera and Hortonworks merging to create a new data platform, and Violin Systems staging a comeback in the extreme performance market.
Cloudera and Hortonworks, competitors in the Hadoop data storage and analytics market, jointly announced Oct. 3 that they have agreed to an all-stock merger worth a combined $5.2 billion. Both boards unanimously approved the merger and will use their synergies to create what they describe as “the world’s leading next-generation data platform provider, spanning multi-cloud, on-premises and the edge.”
The new company, to be called Cloudera Hortonworks for the time being, will focus on trying to become an industry standard for hybrid cloud data management, competing with older, more established vendors such as Amazon Web Services, SAS, Microsoft, MapR, Pivotal, Splunk, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Cloudera has more than 1,600 employees and offices in 24 countries, while Hortonworks has about 750 employees. Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly will be chief executive of the combined company, and Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden will join the new board of directors.
Storage hardware and software maker Violin Systems has announced that it has fine-tuned its strategy and is only going after what it calls the “extreme-performance” storage market.
Despite having what many storage analysts called great technology, Violin has failed to make a dent in markets owned by storage behemoths Dell EMC, IBM and NetApp a year and a half ago. For its comeback, the company is focusing on dominating a smaller market, the extreme performance market, rather than competing with the big guys.
Extreme performance for Violin Systems means three things: ultra-low latency, consistent performance and all the data services. It released a new addition to the Violin Extreme Performance Storage Platform product line, the Violin XVS 8, which the company contends delivers consistent high performance with low latency and enterprise-class data services.