Are these companies competitors to the likes of AWS, Azure or is it more of a collaborative relationship? I know Azure has implemented a hosted version of Hortonworks, how would it be after this merger? What's stopping the big companies from launching their own hadoop distributions?
The market is shrinking for both, and clouds are eating their lunches. HDI is essentially a hosted hortonworks and now there won’t be a confusion between hadoop distributions for customers.
So basically cloudera bought hortonworks to put an end to free enterprise Hadoop. I know so many customers who will never go to cloud anytime soon. So there is lot of demand for on prem Hadoop. The problem was Horton giving the whole stack free. This is what killed the profits of cloudera. Horton right from day 1 played a dirty 0 sum game
Consolidation happening since the market is not big for these two players. Also the problem with open-source support is that any big company can compete in that space. Unless there is a big differenciator it's a tough battle.