The story
Hortonworks was formed in June 2011 as an independent company, funded by $23 million venture capital from Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. Its first office was in Sunnyvale, California. The company employed contributors to the open source software project Apache Hadoop. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) product, first released in June 2012, included Apache Hadoop and was used for storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. The platform was designed to deal with data from many sources and formats. The platform included Hadoop technology such as the Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, ZooKeeper, and additional components.
Eric Baldeschweiler (from Yahoo) was initial chief executive, and Rob Bearden chief operating officer, formerly from SpringSource. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton was a board member. The company name refers to the character Horton the Elephant, since the elephant is the symbol for Hadoop.
In October 2018, Hortonworks and Cloudera announced they would be merging in an all-stock merger of equals. After the merger, the Apache products of Hortonworks became Cloudera Data Platform.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hortonworks, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7