Both companies make most of their money providing professional services. I was going to touch on EMR but I think the “small team” comment is a better differentiator. When you have a large cluster with a large volume of workloads distributed computing becomes much less forgiving. The algorithm that was so fast and so valueable when you first deployed suddenly becomes a bottle neck for the rest of your operations because not enough time was spent thinking about partition strategies... Horton and Cloudera have made their money giving big companies advice when they get in over their heads. It’s rarely in the beginning but usually several years after companies have made a hard commitment to Hadoop and distributed computing.