14 DAY TRIAL // Probably for some people these brands don’t mean much, but they carry some big names in the background. Names like NSA.
Hortonworks, the Big Data company built on Hadoop open source firmware written for computer clusters and commodity hardware, has just bought a seemingly small, and apparently unimpressive startup company called Onyara. At first, it doesn’t sound like the stuff made for headlines until a background check is done on the petite Onyara start-up company.
Put together by a bunch of ex-NSA engineers, Onyara’s founders made sure to bring in the newly formed company all of their eight years’ experience of working in the famous state agency developing a cloud technology software that, under Onyara, would be later known as Apache NiFi, being based on the same Java code as Hadoop. Built on an open source code, the entire program was released to the open source community last year as a part of the NSA Technology Program.
At almost the same time, Onyara was launched with an undisclosed source for funding.
Hortonworks extends both in size and in reach
Today onwards, after Hortonworks has bought Onyara, the new owner just got itself a bunch of ex-NSA guys working on the same Hadoop code the company has been built upon, developing a light-weight agent that creates a secure connection and offers a two-way communication between any online sensors and the database. In fact, Hortonworks acknowledges the advantage of such brains inside the company, praising the intelligence community-built program for working fast, being reliable and secure. He even praises the Apache NiFi as being able to work in very restrictive systems like the incredibly small Raspberry Pi.
An important step forward for Hortonworks would be its IoT (Internet of Things) development together with the ex-Onyara employees, wishing for the company to connect to any IoT-ready device and store the data on Hortonworks servers. Obviously, the Apache NiFi would play a pretty big role in the emerging IoT ecosystem.
According to the acquisition deal, Onyara’s employees will become part of a separate department at Hortonworks and will be treated as a new division, with additional engineers joining them shortly. Onyara’s purchase price hasn’t been disclosed by Hortonworks, but Onyara becomes part of Hortonworks effective immediately.