Intel announced a significant equity investment and broad strategic alliance with Cloudera, a start-up specializing in Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services for enterprises.
Intel's equity investment makes it the largest strategic shareholder in Cloudera. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Under the partnership, Cloudera's enterprise analytic data management software powered by Apache Hadoop will be optimized for data center architecture based on Intel Xeon technology. The goal is acceleration of customer adoption of big data solutions, making it easier for companies of all sizes to obtain increased business value from data by deploying open source Apache Hadoop solutions. Specifically, Cloudera will develop and optimize Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) for Intel architecture as its preferred platform and support a range of next-generation technologies including Intel fabrics, flash memory and security. In turn, Intel will market and promote CDH and Cloudera Enterprise to its customers as its preferred Hadoop platform. Intel will focus its engineering and marketing resources on the joint roadmap.
Under the deal, Intel's Distribution for Apache Hadoop/Intel Data Platform (IDH/IDP) will be integrated into CDH and IDH/IDP and will be transitioned after v3.1 release at the end of March. To ensure a seamless customer transition to CDH, Intel and Cloudera will work together on a migration path from IDH/IDP. Cloudera will also ensure that all enhancements will be contributed to their respective open source projects and CDH.
"By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. "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."
"Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer, Cloudera. "Based on our ability to store, process and analyze all kinds of data, increasingly in new ways, the potential for advances in business, social and economic environments are vast. Teaming with Intel, the industry leader in data center technology innovation, presents an opportunity for us to layer Hadoop into a platform's core framework. The result is rapid performance improvements on workloads such as those extracting intelligent insight. Intel's vision for delivering open, performance optimized solutions for big data is synergistic to our vision to help companies accelerate time to achieving success."
http://www.intel.com
http://www.cloudera.com
Cloudera said it will use the funding to further drive the enterprise adoption of and innovation in Hadoop and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market; support geographic expansion into Europe and Asia; expand its services and support capabilities; and scale the field and engineering organizations.
"Cloudera is successfully helping enterprises exploit 'big data' and manage the transition to becoming more data centric," said Henry Ellenbogen, Portfolio Manager, T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund. "With strong leadership, an ability to innovate, a satisfied customer base, and a large partner community, we believe Cloudera is well positioned to build a durable and leading company in this space."
"We see broad demand from enterprises who want a flexible approach to handling large amounts of data, and we expect this market to continue to grow rapidly," said Google Ventures General Partner Karim Faris. "Cloudera is dramatically lowering the cost of reliable storage for the enterprise and is enabling the analysis and mining of large data sets in a way that wasn't possible before."
Recently, Cloudera brought to market the industry's first complete enterprise data hub. The company said the key advantages for enterprise customers are:
- Frees them from being dependent on expensive, specialized data storage and compute systems, and instead take advantage of the power of industry-standard server hardware and scale-out architecture;
- Enables enterprises to store any amount of data, of any type, and keep it online as long as needed;
- Ensures that data is secure and governed to meet enterprise requirements;
- Makes it possible for customers to "bring compute to the data," to build a single unified data system rather than moving data around from one system to another;
- Lets customers offload selected data and workloads from expensive, specialized data warehouse infrastructure to alleviate the pain of missed SLAs and degraded query performance;
- Can accommodate huge and varied data sets for more meaningful and timely analytics and enable innovative security solutions, such as real-time anomaly detection without duplicating data or building custom, specialized solutions.
