Hortonworks is a business computer software company based in Palo Alto, California. The company focuses on the development and support of Apache Hadoop, a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers.

History

Hortonworks was formed in June 2011 funded by $23 million from Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital as an independent company. The company employs contributors to the open source software project Apache Hadoop. The company was named after Horton the Elephant of the Horton Hears a Who! book. Eric Baldeschweiler was chief executive, and Rob Bearden chief operating officer, formerly from SpringSource. Additional investors included a $25 million round led by Index Ventures in November 2011.

Hortonworks is a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.

Forrester Research named Hortonworks “a technology leader and ecosystem builder for the entire Hadoop industry.”

Hortonworks’ product named Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) includes Apache Hadoop and is used for storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. The platform is designed to deal with data from many sources and formats. The platform includes various Apache Hadoop projects including the Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase and Zookeeper and additional components.

In October 2011 Hortonworks announced Microsoft would collaborate on a Hadoop distribution for Microsoft Azure and Windows Server. On February 25, 2013, Hortonworks announced availability of a beta version of the Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows.

In November 2011 it announced HParser software from Informatica would be available for free download by its customers.

In February 2012 Teradata announced an alliance. In October 2012 Teradata’s Aster Data Systems division announced an appliance supporting Hortonworks’ distribution, and Impetus Technologies announced a partnership.

In June 2013 Hortonworks raised another $50 million in financing, from previous investors and adding Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group. In September 2013 SAP AG announced it would resell the Hortonworks distribution (as well as another one).

Hortonworks hosts the Hadoop Summit community event, along with Yahoo!.

Partnerships

Hortonworks partners with a variety of software-related companies, including BMC Software for business service management and automation, Attunity and Cleo for data integration, and SAP and VMWare for cloud, database and other virtualization infrastructure.

Acquisitions

In May 2014, Hortonworks acquired XA Secure, a data security company, to add a secure layer to its Hadoop Data Platform.