As we kick off the new year I wanted to thank our customers, partners, Apache community members, and of course the amazing Hortonworks team, for an amazing 2016.
Let’s take a step back and look at some of the Hortonworks highlights from last year…
IN THE ECOSYSTEMthere was tremendous acceleration. At the beginning of 2016we introduced a brand new partner program called Partnerworks , designed to meet the needs of the rapidly growing number of companies who want to partner with us.
Partnerworkshas been a great success, providing access to our experts, extensive trainings, and our go-to-market capabilities. So much so that we expanded the program in the middle of the year to include Managed Service Providers and Modern Data Solutions partners. The Hortonworks Partnerworks ecosystem now has an incredible 1,800+ member companies.
2016 was also the year we held four Hadoop Summits across the world:Dublin in April to the cornerstone event inSan Jose in June,Melbourne in August andTokyo in October. This represents the growth of a worldwide movement more than 6,000 people attended a Summit somewhere in the world in 2016. I encourage you to read some of our customer’s business transformations stories above.
It’s now been over a decade for Apache Hadoop and we are proud to have been the host of Hadoop Summit. For the first time in 2016 in San Jose we had entire track of 20 companies doing amazing things inside their businesses with data. The conversation has shifted fundamentally from pure technology to the business value driven by digital anddata transformation s. Many companies are now using Connected Data Platforms to manage all the data-in-motion and data-at-rest in their ecosystem, finding ways to solve problems and gain competitive advantage by harnessing the power of their data.
In 2016, we had more sponsors and partners than ever before. I’d like to thank all partners for their support, especially top sponsors such as Microsoft, BMC, EMC, HPE and Google who were there with us at multiple events. But without all our sponsors and partners, this would not be at all possible.
This year there is a new URL to bookmark in your browser. To reflect the expanding interest in both business and new technologies, we’ve renamed the event DataWorks Summit and Hadoop Summit . This now represents a unique global portfolio of events for both business and technical audiences who want to learn how data is transforming business, and the underlying technologies driving the change. Besides the continued growth of business sessions and Apache Hadoop, you’ll see new technology ‘zones’ for IoT & Streaming, Cloud & Operations, Apache Spark & Data Science. See you in Munich in April 2017!
ON THE PRODUCT SIDEwe made great strides both on premise and in the cloud. Last Marchwe announced a comprehensive new strategy and product advancements across our Connected Data Platforms: Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF) . This included a new distribution strategy and release cadence for core Apache Hadoop components (HDFS, MapReduce and YARN) and Apache Zookeeper updated annually and aligned with the ODPi consortium. Extended services (including Spark, Hive, HBase, Ambari and so on) are logically grouped together and released continually throughout the year to match the pace of innovation occurring within each project team in the community.
In line with this strategy last June at Hadoop Summit , we released HDP 2.5 with many innovations around comprehensive security and trusted governance, enterprise Apache Spark at scale, streamlined operations and developer productivity.
For HDF, followingthe announcement of new streaming analytics capabilities powered by Apache Kafka and Apache Storm in March, we then also came back in August withHDF 2.0 which unveiled a new graphical user experience for accelerated deployment and real-time operation, and integration with Apache Ranger for centralized and comprehensive security policy management of streaming data flows across groups in an enterprise. Plus Apache MiNiFi, a new lightweight edition of Apache NiFi providing data collection for IoT at the edge with enterprise-grade security and management at scale.
ON THE CLOUD FRONTwe extended the power of our Connected Data Platforms to the cloud with major announcements with both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft Azure HDInsight , powered by HDP, has emerged as a leading option for today’s modern organizations as they embrace a cloud-first approach to Big Data workloads. Last Septemberwe announced the latest phase of our HDInsight collaboration with Microsoft, which allows customers to achieve big data query speeds that approach data warehousing performance, provide a highly secure Hadoop cloud solution, and an easier experience to spin up third ISV apps.
Additionally, ourannouncement of Hortonworks Data Cloud for AWS allows customers to choose from a set of prescriptive cluster configurations to start modeling and analyzing data sets in minutes. This is optimized to run well for enterprise ephemeral workloads and is designed to work with AWS Services such as Amazon S3, RDS and EC2.
All of this represents a huge amount of innovation. Thanks to the Hortonworks engineering team and of course the broader open source community.
ON THE BUSINESS MOMENTUM SIDEwe celebrated yet another great milestone exceeding more than 1,000 customers in November which shows tremendous traction of the industry’s only open and connected data platforms to manage data-at-rest and data-in-motion in any environment. We now have nearly 60% penetration of the U.S. Fortune 100 as customers, highlighting our traction with some of the largest organizations in the country.
Last but certainly not least ON THE EMPLOYEE SIDE we saw global growth and expansion in 2016 with ~1,050 employees across 17 countries.We opened new, larger office in Cork, Ireland to extend the global team and create 50 jobs in the region. In addition, I waspleased to welcome Joe Morrissey as Vice President of International and Kamal Brar as Vice President and General Manager of Asia Pacific to accelerate global expansion.Thank you to all the Hortonworkers none of this would be possible without your hard work and dedication.
2016 was an amazing year and I look forward to an even better 2017.