Hortonworks : Welcome to a brand-new Cloudera

It's not just a new year. It's a new era.

Yesterday we were Hortonworks. Today, with the formal completion of our merger, we are Cloudera - which is now the second largest open source software company in the world.

My personal journey in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem started in early 2006. It all started with just a bunch of SVN repositories in the Apache Software Foundation to a public company. Since then, along with the other Hortonworks' co-founders Sanjay Radia, Owen O'Malley, Alan Gates, Mahadev Konar, Devaraj Das, Suresh Srinivas, Eric Baldeschwieler and the rest of the Hortonworks' crew, we've had an incredible ride.

Led by Hortonworks' CEO Rob Bearden, we proved that open source can fuel a successful business model at scale. We are very proud of everything we have achieved here at Hortonworks and the impact it has had on customers - from driving Apache Hadoop YARN in the community, to developing a brand new Apache Hive, to making Apache NiFi the backbone of Hortonworks DataFlow, to most recently launching DataPlane for hybrid environments.

Early in that journey, even before we spun out of Yahoo to start Hortonworks, we saw Cloudera start to try to monetize the Hadoop ecosystem based on the same open-source software with which we also worked. We were both excited and intrigued to see a market form and function around it. Since then, we both have proven that this ecosystem could sustain multiple billion-dollar companies by helping the largest enterprises really leverage and glean value from all their data.

Late last year, after a few starts, we decided that it made sense to come together and join forces. Since both companies were founded, we have shared common open source heritage for nearly a decade, and the underlying technology platforms that our communities built and supported. Because of this, our teams are already remarkably similar and known to each other via the community. The speed with which our merger concluded is a testament to our common vision and viewpoints.

Today also marks the dawn of the industry's first enterprise data cloud, which brings the right data analytics to data - anywhere enterprises need to work. Both companies have been diligently working on this basic idea - separately - for several years. While the Hortonworks teams were invested in real-time streaming and data ingest to support IoT use cases at the edge, Cloudera was emphasizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to empower data scientists with vastly sophisticated tooling to automate ML workflows.

Our customers asked, and we will deliver

Now we are one, by working together we can combine our assets and complementary strategies to 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. Our combined platform will be built to run the most demanding IoT/streaming, data engineering, cloud-native data warehousing and AI and ML applications across the datacenter, public clouds and the edge.

Cloudera is now the only data management company to run across all major public cloud infrastructures: AWS, Azure, Google, IBM and Oracle. And because we've invested so consistently and heavily in engineers and committers in the open-source community, we'll be able to fuel innovation faster than we could have achieved as standalone companies.

By joining forces, we now have the scale, resources and talent to do more, do it faster - and, as we always dream, to make the impossible possible. Our market presence is larger - we're the clear market-leader and our financial foundation is impressively solid:

• More than $760 million in TTM revenue (as of each companies' fiscal Q3)
• Over $500 million in cash and zero debt
• Accelerated path to our collective long-term target model for cash generation

Next up - Cloud everywhere!

Our merger did not arise out of the blue. Our respective missions were well aligned, and together the new Cloudera has the scale it needs to service the constantly changing needs of the world's most demanding organizations and to grow even more dominant in the market.

New open-source standards such as Kubernetes, container technology and the growing adoption of cloud-native architectures are major parts of Cloudera's strategy. Our primary initiative out of the gate is to deliver a 100-percent open-source unified platform, which leverages the best features of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 3.0 and Cloudera's CDH 6.0. Cloud-native and built for any cloud - with a public cloud experience across all clouds - the unified platform embodies our shared 'cloud everywhere' vision.

The combined platform will enable enterprises to create greater value from data with:

• The right data analytics, running on data anywhere
• Strong enterprise-grade and enterprise-wide data security, governance and management
• Flexibility to choose among multi- and hybrid clouds.

We're eternally grateful for everybody who helped us achieve this milestone

And while Cloudera is moving forward rapidly and with confidence, we're not leaving our customers, partners or the community behind. More than anything, the new Cloudera extends our promise to organizations seeking to transform complex data - wherever it resides - into clear insights and actions.

So, now it's time to ring out the old Hortonworks and old Cloudera and ring in the new Cloudera. With gratitude, we thank our partners, our customers, our employees and the entire Apache and open source communities.

To one and all: Happy new year. Happy new era. Happy customers and partners. And happy (and merry) Cloudera.

If you'd like to learn more, be sure to join us for our virtual event on January 10, 2019 when Cloudera leadership will unveil more about our vision and direction.