Hortonworks Wants To Own Big Data Without Owning Anything - Forbes

The next 12 months in the Hadoop platform vendor space are going to be very interesting

"By contrast, Bearden, Hortonworks’ CEO, is very clear that he doesn’t want “to dis-intermediate anybody.” “We are focused on not moving up the stack,” Bearden says. Which is a polite way, I think, of saying, “not stepping on the toes of anyone with the capacity to crush us.” By feeding Hadoop to the market through partners, it’s incorporating itself into the larger, established data system – and indirectly providing the established players with a line of defense against coups from other upstarts. But without product to sell, it will need many more subscription contracts to compete with Cloudera. Bearden sees this as necessary for long-term survival in a market dominated by huge players."

Hortonworks Wants To Own Big Data Without Owning Anything - Forbes