Hortonworks chief executive officer Rob Bearden confirmed the departure of co-founder and CTO Eric Baldeschwieler in a Tuesday entry on the company’s blog. He did not disclose the reason behind Baldeschwieler’s resignation, but instead took the opportunity to recap on the former Yahoo executive’s contributions to Hortonworks and the Hadoop ecosystem.

“It’s hard to believe it’s been over two years since Hortonworks was founded by over 20 engineers from the original Yahoo! Hadoop development and operations team,” the executive wrote in his post. “That team’s origins came in 2005 when Eric assembled engineers to solve a really hard problem: store and process the data on the Internet in a simple, scalable and economically feasible way. Those were humble beginnings for an open source technology, namely Apache Hadoop, which now finds itself in 2013 very much at the center of next-generation big data architectures.”

According to the management team page on Hortonworks’ website, chief products officer Ari Zilka is stepping into Baldeschiewler’s shoes. Zilka joined the startup in March 2012 from Terracotta, a leading provider of application scalability solutions he founded in 2003.

The appointment of Zilka as CTO comes on the heels of a major executive reshuffle at Cloudera, Hortonworks’ largest competitor. Former ArcSight boss Tom Reilly replaced Mike Olson as the Hadoop distributor’s CEO in late June, a move that signaled a change of direction for the company.

Less than a week after Tom Reilly took over the reins at Cloudera, Hortonworks announced that it has raised $50 million in funding from new investors Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group. Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo also participated in the round. Rob Bearden said that his firm will use the new capital to scale global sales and marketing and accelerate product development.