Big-data software company Cloudera Inc. has named former Hortonworks Inc. boss Rob Bearden as its new president and chief executive officer, replacing its previous CEO Tom Reilly, who stepped down from the company in July.

Bearden is a seemingly safe option for Cloudera, since he was previously the CEO of rival big-data firm Hortonworks, which merged with Cloudera last year in a stock swap deal that valued the combined companies at $5.2 billion.

Cloudera and Hortonworks joined forces in 2019 after spending years battling each other to commercialize the open-source Apache Hadoop big data software, which is used by companies to store and process lots of different kinds of business information. But neither of them was able to translate the popularity of Hadoop into profits, and faced with a growing challenge from better-funded cloud rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc., the companies ultimately decided an alliance was the way forward.

Reilly left in July, just weeks after that merger was formerly completed. His departure came about just days after it was revealed that the activist investor Carl Icahn had taken a significant stake in the company.

Cloudera had enjoyed a brief resurgence of sorts under interim CEO Marty Cole. During his six-month tenure, the company launched its much-anticipated Cloudera Data Platform, a combined, cloud-based successor to the pre-merger Cloudera and Hortonworks offerings.

The company’s stock has almost doubled in that time, and it easily beat expectations in its most recent financial quarter. But the firm’s current $3.4 billion market capitalization is still well short of the original $5.2 billion valuation that was bandied around when the merger was first announced.

Bearden, who co-founded Hortonworks in 2011, left the company last year on the same day that merger was completed. He briefly took over the CEO reins at container software company Docker Inc., only to leave that role a few months later after it sold off part of its business to Mirantis Inc.

Since then, Bearden has spent the last few months meeting with Cloudera’s board of directors to cement his new role at the company and establish a plan for its 2021 fiscal year.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said the decision to hire Bearden suggests that Cloudera might have been struggling in its hunt for a new CEO.

“When you go in circles, you consume time and energy but you don’t progress,” Mueller said. “It’s ironic that Cloudera/Hortonworks has decided to get Bearden back at the helm, as he would have been a good choice to steer the ship in the first place. This is a key lesson for boards of directors considering similar mergers that would do well to realize that the buyer may not always have the best talent for the job.”

In any case, Bearden is well-suited for the role at Cloudera because he’s familiar with its culture and its goals, said Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. As a result, he should be able to continue driving greater efficiencies to help the company become more profitable.

“It’s also worth mentioning that Bearden led two companies — Jboss and SpringSource — to high-profile acquisitions,” King said. “If the market for third-party Hadoop solutions fails to develop as robustly as Cloudera’s board and investors hope, they could ask Bearden to lead the company to a similarly successful end.”

Cloudera’s stock rose almost 2% following the announcement.

Photo: SiliconANGLE