Hortonworks to speed Hadoop cloud deployments

Hortonworks announced today6 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Budapest-based SequenceIQ, an open source provider of rapid deployment tools for Hadoop.

The move marks the second acquisition for the four-year-old Hortonworks, which last year acquired Hadoop security specialist XA Secure. Hortonworks donated XA Secure’s IP to the Apache Software Foundation to form the core of the Apache Ranger project.

Tim Hall, vice president of Product Management at Hortonworks, says today’s acquisition brings Hortonworks a highly skilled team of engineers and significant deployment automation technology for launching on-demand Hadoop clusters in the cloud or any environment that supports Docker containers. Cloudbreak is SequenceIQ’s elastic and cloud-agnostic deployment solution for HDP clusters. The company has also developed Periscope, which provides policy-based autoscaling for multitenant HDP clusters.

Immediate plans

Hortonworks plans to immediately begin incorporating SequenceIQ’s technology into its Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) distribution of Hadoop and to ultimately transition the technology to the Apache Software Foundation.

“We’re thrilled to have the SequenceIQ team join us,” Hall says. “They’re second-to-none in the industry. We think this is a one-plus-one-equals-three situation.”

Hall notes that the acquisition also gives Hortonworks a foothold in Europe.

“We’ve been continuing to expand geographically,” Hall says. “We’ve been expanding our European presence in terms of sales and support over the past year. In fact, we’re going to have our first customer advisory board in Europe on the 14th of April.”

“From an engineering perspective, having both engineering talent and support within the same geographic time zone is huge,” he adds. “Our customers in Europe will appreciate that they have local expertise. They won’t have to wait nine hours or more to get their questions answered. The team from SequenceIQ is world-class.”

Hall also notes that together with the user experience capabilities introduced through Ambari Views last year, the acquisition is likely to lead to an increase in localization efforts around Hadoop.

“To date, when you look at the various projects within HDP and then take a step back to look at what is going on within the community, you won’t see a lot of user interface,” he says. “A lot of command line tools have been built to date. I think what you’ll see over 2015 is the community start to rally around the Ambari Views framework to really build that user experience.”

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