Hortonworks Co-Founder And Hadoop Rock Star Baldeschwieler Departs

GigaOm reported Monday that Baldeschwieler, who moved to the CTO role at Hortonworks last year, was no longer listed on Hortonworks' management team and board of directors Web pages.

In a Tuesday blog post, Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden thanked Baldeschwieler for "his contributions to the Hadoop community" but said nothing about why he left or what he'll be doing next.

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"I'd like to reiterate that we are extremely appreciative of all of Eric's contributions over the past few years and wish him all the best in his future endeavors," Bearden said in the blog post.

A Hortonworks spokesperson told CRN Baldeschwieler "has left and is taking some time off."

Ari Zilka, chief products officer at Hortonworks, has been promoted to CTO, the spokesperson said in an email.

Baldeschwieler led a team of 22 engineers from Yahoo's Hadoop development and operations team and was named CEO when Yahoo spun it off as Hortonworks in 2011.

But in February 2012, he was replaced by Bearden, former COO at SpringSource and JBoss. Hortonworks didn't announce that move, but GigaOm, which was first to report on it, suggested Bearden was brought in to jump-start the fledgling company's business model.

In June, Hortonworks landed $50 million in venture capital funding and has raised some $120 million to date.

Hortonworks' flagship product is the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), its own distribution of Apache Hadoop, and it also sells support, training and other services.

Hortonworks' main competitors are Cloudera and MapR Technologies, but it's also going up against a host of other startups in the red hot big data space.

In 2011, Hortonworks partnered with Microsoft in a deal aimed at bringing Hadoop into the vast Windows user base.

PUBLISHED AUGUST 7, 2013