They all are keeping a close eye on AWS. The leader in cloud infrastructure has successfully pulled companies’ core workloads into its data centers and is now adding new features, functions and services that are easy to use once a business is already on Amazon’s machines.
Cloudera is particularly at risk because Amazon has been investing heavily in databases. AWS’ competitive products include Elastic MapReduce, for storing and processing different data types, and Redshift, a data warehouse system. Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at at D.A. Davidson, estimates that EMR generated about $250 million in revenue in 2018, while Redshift reached about $400 million, a small fraction of the $25.5 billion AWS is expected to report for the year, according to analysts polled by FactSet.
At the time of the Cloudera-Hortonworks deal, the companies said they would have combined annual revenue of $720 million and that they expected 2020 revenue to exceed $1 billion.
The beefed-up Cloudera has certain strengths as it stares down Amazon. Reilly said Cloudera is the standard-bearer for companies that want to use Hadoop because it’s independent and has a clear open-source model.
Cloudera also works in corporate data centers and across multiple clouds. For years AWS focused exclusively on delivering software to companies from its own remote data centers, and it only recently announced servers that will be able to run Amazon software inside of other companies’ existing data centers. Unlike Cloudera, AWS doesn’t have a way to let companies use many of its software products on clouds operated by Microsoft or Google.
“Amazon will never be able to deliver multi-cloud,” said Reilly, who has run Cloudera since 2013 and took it public in 2017.
Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Deploying Cloudera’s software in the cloud is becoming more commonplace. As of June, 26 percent of customers that provide diagnostic information to the company are using the software on a public cloud like Amazon, up from 22 percent one year earlier.
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