Hortonworks was a data software company based in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...

that developed and supported

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

(primarily around

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

) designed to manage

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

and associated processing. Hortonworks software was used to build enterprise data services and applications such as IoT (connected cars, for example), single view of X (such as customer, risk, patient), and advanced analytics and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

(such as next best action and realtime cybersecurity). Hortonworks had three interoperable product lines: * Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP): based on

Apache Hive Apache Hive is a data warehouse software project built on top of Apache Hadoop for providing data query and analysis. Hive gives an SQL-like interface to query data stored in various databases and file systems that integrate with Hadoop. Traditi ...

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californi ...

Hortonworks DataFlow Hortonworks was a data software company based in Santa Clara, California that developed and supported open-source software (primarily around Apache Hadoop) designed to manage big data and associated processing. Hortonworks software was used to ...

(HDF): based on

Apache NiFi Apache NiFi is a software project from the Apache Software Foundation designed to automate the flow of data between software systems. Leveraging the concept of extract, transform, load (ETL), it is based on the "''NiagaraFiles''" software previo ...

Apache Storm Apache Storm is a distributed stream processing computation framework written predominantly in the Clojure programming language. Originally created by Nathan Marz and team at BackType, the project was open sourced after being acquired by Twitter. ...

, Apache Kafka * Hortonworks DataPlane services (DPS): based on Apache Atlas and Cloudbreak and a pluggable architecture into which partners such as IBM can add their services. In January 2019, Hortonworks completed its merger with

Cloudera Cloudera, Inc. is an American software company providing enterprise data management systems that make significant use of Apache Hadoop. As of January 31, 2021, the company had approximately 1,800 customers. History Cloudera, Inc. was formed on J ...

History

Hortonworks was formed in June 2011 as an independent company, funded by $23 million

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

from

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

and

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mill ...

. Its first office was in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

. The company employed contributors to the

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

project

. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) product included Apache Hadoop and was used for storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. The platform was designed to deal with data from many sources and formats. The platform included Hadoop technology such as the Hadoop Distributed File System,

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

, Pig, Hive,

HBase HBase is an open-source non-relational distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable and written in Java. It is developed as part of Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File Sys ...

ZooKeeper A zookeeper, sometimes referred as animal keeper, is a person who manages zoo animals that are kept in captivity for conservation or to be displayed to the public.Hurwitz, Jane. Choosing a Career in Animal Care (World of Work). New York: Rosen Gr ...

, and additional components. Eric Baldeschweiler (from Yahoo) was initial chief executive, and Rob Bearden chief operating officer, formerly from

SpringSource Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was the company created by the founders of the Spring Framework (a programming model for enterprise Java applications) to support and develop Spring and related projects. Originally incorporated as Inte ...

. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton was a board member. The company name refers to the character

Horton the Elephant Horton the Elephant is a fictional character from the 1940 book ''Horton Hatches the Egg'' and 1954 book ''Horton Hears a Who!'', both by Dr. Seuss. In both books and subsequent media, Horton is characterized as a kind, sweet-natured and naïve e ...

, since the elephant is the symbol for Hadoop. In October 2018, Hortonworks and

announced they would be merging in an all-stock merger of equals. After the merger, the Apache products of Hortonworks became Cloudera Data Platform.

References

External links

{{Authority control Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Companies based in Santa Clara, California Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Hadoop Apache Software Foundation Software companies established in 2011 2011 establishments in the United States 2011 establishments in California Big data companies 2014 initial public offerings 2019 mergers and acquisitions Software companies of the United States