Massive Investment in Big Data Firm Cloudera

Enterprise analytic data management firm Cloudera has announced another $740m in financing, this time from chipmaker Intel, which becomes an 18 percent shareholder in the booming firm.

Intel's investment values the big data firm, founded only in 2008 and expected by some to go public later this year, at around $4.1bn.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after DRNO reported Cloudera's raising of $160m from Google Ventures, T. Rowe Price, and an affiliate of Michael Dell's family investment vehicle, MSD Capital. In announcing the full $900m investment, due to complete in the second quarter, Cloudera said it represented a 'tectonic shift' in the adoption of Hadoop and other big data techologies, and pointed to IDC forecasts of a $32.4bn market for big data technology and services by 2017, and a Gartner estimate that the market for data management infrastructure and related systems will grow from $74bn this year to $94bn that year.

Cloudera recently brought to market what it describes as 'the industry's first complete enterprise data hub', allowing clients to take on large scale, more advanced and diverse workloads and realize previously unthinkable strategic benefits from their data. Intel has until now promoted its own, customized version of Hadoop but will move away from this to support the Cloudera approach.

CEO Tom Reilly (pictured) comments, '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.'

CFO Jim Frankola says the latest investments give the company 'significant financial resources to accelerate growth and deliver long-term sustainable value to our customers and partners.' Specifically, the new funding will be used to support its collaboration agreement with Intel, further drive enterprise adoption of and innovation with Hadoop, promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market; expand services, engineering teams and sales force; and support geographic expansion into Europe and Asia, including China via Intel's presence there.

Web site: www.cloudera.com .