Their customers hired them to build out systems that would provide in-house clouds and their tooling helped make HDFS deployment, management and integration a bit easier.
They decided to open source all of their software at some point which meant their model went from:
- Provide tools to make deploying HDFS better, this was their secret sauce
- Provide services to setup/manage all of this
to
- Provide services to setup/manage all of this
Since everything else in their stack was open-source also, their secret sauce consisted of just being a group of engineers, which isn't much of a secret sauce, except they thought it was because "our guys know the ecosystem and tooling we developed" and so charged more for those service engagements.
Their customers realized this, hired cheaper groups of engineers (some of who included previous employees) who then worked with the now free and open sourced tools that "somebody" else had now spent VC money building instead of them.
Inside of a year or so they turned from a successful and growing concern into a VC investment black-hole and closed up shop.
The tooling and many-man-years of effort that went into developing it all was what the business was about and they simply opened it all up to the world, who then just downloaded it and replaced them.
