Hortonworks Appoints Herb Cunitz as President

20-Year Tech Industry Veteran Brings Extensive Sales and Operations Experience at Fast-Growing Open Source Companies

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop projects, today announced that Herb Cunitz has joined the Company’s executive team as President. Cunitz has unmatched experience in growing worldwide sales and operations teams, and will be responsible for helping Hortonworks continue to scale global operations to meet market demand for its Apache Hadoop technology, services and support. Cunitz was most recently vice president of global field operations for the cloud application platform division at VMware.

Hortonworks is a leading commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the leading open source platform for storing, managing and analyzing big data. The Company has experienced rapid growth since its inception in 2011 and continues to help Apache Hadoop gain mass appeal and increase adoption among enterprises and technology vendors alike. Recently, Hortonworks announced its newest version of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), the industry’s only 100-percent open source platform powered by Apache Hadoop.

“This is a pivotal time for the Apache Hadoop community, with the number of enterprise deployments growing every day,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks. “Cunitz’s outstanding experience in growing and managing worldwide sales and field operations teams will play an integral part as we continue to ensure that Apache Hadoop becomes the de facto platform for storing, processing, managing and analyzing big data across the ecosystem of enterprises and partners.”

“Hortonworks has gained substantial momentum in the Hadoop market as more organizations adopt the Hortonworks Data Platform,” said Herb Cunitz, president of Hortonworks. “As the only vendor with a 100 percent open source strategy, we are setting the standard for the next-generation data platforms and that is being recognized in the enterprise.”

Prior to joining Hortonworks, Cunitz was vice president of global field operations at VMware, responsible for growing worldwide sales, presales, consulting, education, channels, operations and strategy for the cloud application platform, a division of VMware. He joined VMware through its acquisition of SpringSource where he served as vice president of worldwide sales, offering open source software solutions for enterprise JAVA applications. Prior to SpringSource, Cunitz held a variety of other senior sales and operations positions at Silicon Valley-based technology companies. He began his career at IBM, quickly advancing in his nearly ten-year tenure within different sales and marketing positions. Cunitz holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Columbia University in the City of New York and a master of business administration from New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

About Hortonworks

Hortonworks is a leading commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the preeminent open source platform for storing, managing and analyzing big data. Our distribution, Hortonworks Data Platform powered by Apache Hadoop, provides an open and stable foundation for enterprises and a growing ecosystem to build and deploy big data solutions. Hortonworks is the trusted source for information on Hadoop, and together with the Apache community, Hortonworks is making Hadoop more robust and easier to install, manage and use. Hortonworks provides unmatched technical support, training and certification programs for enterprises, systems integrators and technology vendors. For more information, visit www.hortonworks.com.