Yahoo Forms Hortonworks To Increase Hadoop Adoption

Yahoo Inc. and Benchmark Capital founded Hortonworks, an independent company consisting of key architects and core contributors to the open source Apache Hadoop technology pioneered by Yahoo. The formation of Hortonworks increases investment in the development of Apache Hadoop and will accelerate adoption by making it more robust and easier to install, manage and use for enterprises and technology vendors. This investment will enable Apache Hadoop to meet the growing market demand and become the big data management and analysis platform of choice for the industry.

Apache Hadoop is the open source technology at the epicentre of big data and cloud computing. It enables organisations to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, process, manage and analyse the ever-increasing volume of data being created and collected every day. With Apache Hadoop companies can connect thousands of servers to process and analyse data at supercomputing speed. Yahoo pioneered, is the primary contributor to, and one of the leading users of Apache Hadoop.

“Apache Hadoop has been and will continue to be an important area of investment for Yahoo. The creation of Hortonworks will enable Yahoo to leverage a commercial partnership in addition to our continued internal investment to accelerate the evolution of the technology and its use to power Yahoo!’s business,” said Jay Rossiter, senior vice president, Cloud Platform Group at Yahoo. “Forming Hortonworks with Benchmark Capital is the natural next step in the evolution of Apache Hadoop. As Hadoop demand continues to increase, Hortonworks will help organisations more rapidly and effectively implement the technology to derive value and insights from large data sets.”

“We anticipate that within five years, more than half the world’s data will be stored in Apache Hadoop. We’ve assembled a top caliber team committed to the Apache open source community and with the technology and business expertise to deliver value to the big data market,” said Eric Baldeschwieler, named CEO of Hortonworks and formerly VP of software engineering for the Hadoop team at Yahoo.

“Apache Hadoop is an exceptionally valuable technology and its growing adoption during the last five years demonstrates its potential to quickly become the de facto platform for managing big data.”