ClouderaCopied

Cloudera and Hortonworks spent years as rivals selling Hadoop before merging. IT Pro's Keumars Afifi-Sabet reported that the 5.2 billion dollar deal had been discussed for three and a half years, and The Register's Rebecca Hill noted it closed in January 2019, only 90 days after it was announced. The combined company took one partner's name: Cloudera.

The new identity surfaced at the DataWorks Summit in Barcelona in March 2019, traditionally a Hortonworks event. Hill, given a sneak peek, described the change with relish: lowercase cloudera became uppercase CLOUDERA, and the E turned into three horizontal lines, which she compared to the E in Esprit, the F in Fila and the bars atop the Ericsson logo, part of a retro 1980s vibe. Chief marketing officer Mick Hollison showed it to a packed auditorium of Hortonworks customers. There was no nod to Hortonworks, and no elephants, the Hadoop mascot, for a company now selling itself as the enterprise data cloud.

It was clearly unfinished. Hill reported there had been no time to prepare a formal launch, so there was none of the usual explanation of what the logo represented, while conference giveaways and boards around the venue still carried old branding, including Hortonworks' elephants. Afifi-Sabet wrote that Cloudera handed out metal pins with its old logo the same week it promised a new one, that its Twitter page still showed the old mark, and that Hortonworks branding appeared to have been discarded entirely in favour of a complete image refresh and slogans like from the edge to AI.

IT Pro's wider read was harsh. Losses had doubled to more than 85 million dollars, the chief executive was absent, and the marketing chief was the only company voice at the keynote, an almost singular focus on image.

The logo itself is not the problem. Capitals carry more weight than a soft lowercase, and the three bar E is a neat, memorable device even if, as Hill says, it borrows from the eighties. The problem is sequence. Revealing a new mark at your rival's old conference, while handing out pins with your old one and without explaining what it means, turns a confident rebrand into a symbol of a merger that had not yet worked out who it was.