Cloudera and Hortonworks are merging operations in a $5.2 billion deal. The merger combines Cloudera’s focus on data warehousing and machine learning with Hortonworks efforts in data management.

While described as a “merger of equals,” Cloudera shareholders will control 60% of the combined entity. Hortonworks shareholders will receive 1.305 common shares of Cloudera for each share of Hortonworks stock owned. The new entity will also keep the Cloudera name.

Cloudera’s stock surged more than 24% in after-hours trading to $21.25 per share. Hortonworks’ stock rose 25% to $27.35 per share.

The two companies combined have more than 2,500 customers and have generated approximately $720 million in revenues through the first half of their current fiscal years.

Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly will be CEO of the combined company. Cloudera CFO Jim Frankola will keep his same position. Hortonworks COO Scott Davidson and Chief Product Officer Arun Murthy will maintain their roles.

Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden will join the new company’s board of directors. That board will initially include four members from Hortonworks' current board and five members from Cloudera’s current board. A tenth member will be elected by the combined board.

Big data focus

Cloudera was founded in 2008 and helped pioneer the market for Hadoop, which is a distributed database system designed for interpreting large amounts of data. More recently, it has focused on developing and deploying multi-function applications in the cloud.

Hortonworks started in 2011, with an open source focus around Apache Hadoop and Spark for distributed processing of large data sets across clusters. The company is also part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi). Cloudera had initially questioned the need for what it viewed as ODPi’s vendor-driven focus.

Both companies were lumped into the “strong performers” category in a recent Forrester Research report on the big data fabric space. “Leaders” in the space include Talend, Oracle, IBM, Paxata, and Denodo Technologies.

Big data fabric is a way to accelerate insights by automating the intake, curation, discovery, preparation, and integration of data from data silos.