Comment on Cloudera/Hortonworks Deal by John Schroeder, CEO and COB, MapR

This is a comment by John Schroeder, CEO and COB, MapR Technologies, Inc., following the Cloudera/Hortonworks merger.

Customers will not gain innovation benefits through this merger. The merger is about cost cutting.

Cloudera and Hortonworks have several redundant competing technologies, for example Ambari and Cloudera Manager or Sentry and Ranger. The merger announcement says these redundant technologies will be “unified” meaning some will be discontinued customers undue switching cost pain.

They have little technology that is accretive to their overall platform. They are claiming a next generation data platform without the underlying technology. MapR has delivered on a next generation platform based on 9 years of hard engineering.

We support a broader set of workloads from Hadoop, to Spark to AI/ML and already provide hybrid cloud and containerization with Kubernetes. MapR customers are already implementing what the merged company says they are hoping to deliver.