Pivotal, part of the EMC Federation of companies, has killed its Hadoop distribution and will instead leverage Hortonworks' offering. The expanded Pivotal-Hortonworks relationship "brings together Hortonworks' expertise and support for data management and processing with Pivotal's top analytics engine for Apache Hadoop," the two companies said.
Seeking to ensure customers don't wind up with dead-end technology, Hortonworks and Pivotal are jointly going to market with an upgrade program for existing Pivotal customers to take advantage of Hortonworks' software, the two companies said.
Pivotal's decision to abandon its own Hadoop distribution surfaced for a range of reasons. For starters, Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR are considered the three leading Hadoop providers -- leaving Pivotal in a distant No. 4 position (at best). Another key consideration: EMC wants all of its businesses to sharpen their focus as Dell seeks to finalize the $67 billion buyout of EMC. The Dell-EMC combination is expected to be completed between May and October 2016.
Meanwhile, the overall Hadoop market also is in transition. Although the industry is growing quickly, the major players are diversifying into other areas -- such as Apache Spark and real-time streaming technology -- to help round out their businesses.
More market Hadoop consolidation could be coming, TechTarget speculates. Among the big wildcards is IBM's Hadoop offering, which is super-niche. Most folks think IBM will eventually follow Pivotal's lead and embrace Hortonworks.
Despite all the market posturing, partner programs over at Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR are in growth mode. IT consulting firms and integrators have been the big winners, helping customers to deploy low-cost Hadoop storage grids that drive big data applications.
