Tom Reilly, the long-time CEO at Cloudera, certainly sees the two companies as complementary, offering customers something together that they couldn't separately.
Analysts were generally optimistic about the long-term possibilities, particularly because the companies have complementary sets of customers.
Long seen as adversaries, Linux and Windows are in fact complementary, and most customers dont have a religious feeling about either of them.
"We are combining highly complementary businesses, technologies, customer bases, with remarkably compatible cultures, management styles and visions," Mr. Sapp added.
"I think when we look at the combination, there are complementary technologies and customer bases and a wealth of resources in the combined organization that will enable us to cover more markets as we sell and market our solutions," he said.
"With this complementary platform and new customers, we see potential synergies in product cost, shipping, fulfillment and integration of technology platforms," the Walmart spokesperson said.
In intermediate cases, i.e. when the firms produce complementary services for some customers and substitutable services for others, the regulators' view regarding collusion should depend on the weight they put on welfare provided for the different groups of customers.
Yet, in order for these companies to succeed, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is going to have to rise through some combination of repeat customers and complementary services to deepen the relationship and create new revenue channels.
The sales representative can then open Web pages directly on the customer's browser, rather than simply describing where to go, and can steer a customer to complementary or more upscale products -- a practice called crossselling and upselling in retail circles.
Two complementary problems inspired from customer surveys are successively considered.
