Cloudera has raised $900 million from IPOs to dwarf other fund raising campaigns on what is being called a [“strategic hit to other”] data center vendors.
The leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, announced a $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. This financing round includes the previously-announced $160 million of funding from T. Rowe Price and three other top-tier public market investors, Google Ventures, and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment arm of Michael Dell and his family, and a significant equity investment by Intel that gives them an 18% share of Cloudera.
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Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop company, develops and distributes Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the world’s largest and most popular web sites. “Founded by leading experts on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo,” according to Crunchbase, “Cloudera’s mission is to bring the power of Hadoop, MapReduce, and distributed storage to companies of all sizes in the enterprise, Internet and government sectors.
Tom Reily, chief executive officer for Cloudera said, “The market opportunity for companies to gain insight and build transformative applications based on Hadoop is tremendous. Clearly, demand is accelerating and the market is poised for growth — for all of the players in this space, and we believe Cloudera will be the company to lead this global shift in extracting value from data. This position of strength and leadership is evidenced by the strong support of public market investors, large institutional investors and now key strategic investors including Intel, who’ve made sizable and significant contributions to cement our platform offering.”
Investors into Cloudera include: Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel.
Intel has partnered with Cloudera to push their Apache Hadoop distribution to become the biggest data collection corporation. This collaboration is expected to broaden technological strategy to justify this “significant equity investment”.
Mike Olson, chief strategy officer for Cloudera explained how they have “crafted a commercial relationship with Intel.” Olson explains, “We reach many more customers directly and through our partners. We build better software that takes advantage of Intel silicon innovations, and get it into the open source sooner. Our customers get the best product earlier and get more value from their data.”
According to Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Data Center Group (IDCG). “By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics. We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business. This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things.”
This merger furthers the predictions outlined by experts at IDC Government Insights, the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets.
The IDC released a report concerning “smart cities are at an inflection point and will need to focus on mission-driven technology solutions.” The report suggests that in 2014 “15% of smart cities will move up the implementation framework to the opportunistic stage, exhibiting characteristics such as stakeholder buy-in for projects and a move toward more consequential projects overall.”
Predictions from IDC for smart cities in 2014 are:
- 15% of cities in the world will be in the Opportunistic Stage of Smart City maturity.
- Shadow IT will be a major source of departmental level innovation but will threaten Smart City roadmaps.
- The key enabler of omni-channel citizen experience will be mobile.
- The business case for NextGen 311 investment will be based on operational performance transformation value and not just customer service.
- Open data sets and open APIs will start to affect policy decision-making.leading edge cities experiment with gamification as first step to nudge citizen behavior change.
- Worldwide Smart City spending on the Internet of Things will be $265 billion in 2014.
- In 2014, Smart Cities will redirect 15-20% of traditional IT spending to the cloud.
- 45% of all big data use cases will be in financial performance, public safety, and transportation.
Competition heats up and there is significant M&A and partnership activity as vendors better define their offerings. The pioneering technology used in the Hadoop is being fostered by “big data projects” that facilitate information-driven enterprises.
This article has been edited and condensed.
Susanne Posel is the CEO and Chief Editor of The US Independent News. As a globally syndicated independent journalist, she joins together top shelf journalists, broadcasters, whistle blowers and business professionals to bring the media consumer more vibrant, in depth information. The US Independent stands for the original journalistic model of sourced documents, honesty and integrity in reporting of fact-based news.
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