Hadoop Provider Cloudera Raises $160M in New Funding
The Big Data world continues to attract attention both in terms of users and in terms of funding. In the world of Big Data, Hadoop is king. At the pinnacle of the Hadoop ecosystem sits commercial vendor Cloudera, which this week announced it has raised a new $160 million round of funding. To date, Cloudera has garnered $300 million in venture capital to fuel its Hadoop-powered Big Data dreams.
“The market opportunity for Hadoop and enterprise data hubs will be measured in the tens of billions of dollars,” Cloudera CFO, Jim Frankola told Enterprise Apps Today. “The technology is both pervasive and disruptive.”
Allied Market Research just released a study that put the global Hadoop market at $1.5 billion in 2012 and predicts it will reach a whopping $50.2 billion by 2020.
Cloudera is the leader in a competitive market, Frankola added, and the new investment will allow Cloudera to accelerate its lead and capture a larger share of this opportunity faster. More specifically, Frankola said the new funding round will allow Cloudera to further drive enterprise adoption of and innovation in Hadoop and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market.
Additionally the funding will be used to support the company's geographic expansion into Europe and Asia, and will help expand Cloudera's services, support and engineering capabilities.
In a 2012 interview with Enterprise Apps Today, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson explained that rather than seek an acquisition by a big company like IBM, he'd rather guide Cloudera into becoming a company like IBM.
Big Data has been attracting big money for years. In 2011, Enterprise Apps Today reported that venture capitalists had invested some $350 million into Big Data companies like Cloudera.
Even with all that money on the table, it's still not clear if there is actual profitability yet. Frankola told Enterprise Apps Today that Cloudera doesn't disclose profitability.
Cloudera's products are all based on the open-source Apache Hadoop project. The Cloudera distribution of Hadoop (CDH) is Cloudera's open-source offering and is freely available. On top of CDH, Cloudera offers multiple Enterprise editions which offer additional features.
Moving forward, the plan for Cloudera's future growth is about increasing adoption.
“We are looking forward to continued rapid expansion and anticipate that more of our customers will move out of the early adopter phase as Hadoop increasingly moves to more production use cases,” Frankola said. “Hadoop is rapidly becoming the center of gravity for all enterprise data.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
