Cloudera and Hortonworks combo to push CDP, machine learning

A would-be data management juggernaut got its first public airing as Cloudera -- a combination of formerly separate Hadoop pioneers Cloudera and Hortonworks -- as the newly stand-alone vendor's leaders publicly mapped the road it intends to take forward. "The combination has made sense for many years," said Tom Reilly, CEO of the combined companies, who held a similar role at the former Cloudera. Others agreed these leaders in open-source-oriented big data tooling -- built along lines drawn by big web companies, such as Google and Yahoo -- are better together than apart and can offer users a unified big data platform. Reilly spoke as part of a prerecorded webcast heralding the new company, which came after confirmation that shareholders of Cloudera and Hortonworks had approved a merger of the firms -- a deal first disclosed last October. Cloudera faces distinct challenges, as it moves data applications to the cloud and tries to convey users to the fast-growing new world of machine learning and AI.