Cloudera Wraps Up $900 Million Round, Record in History of Storage Industry

Cloudera, Inc. 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 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.

“The market opportunity for companies to gain insight and build transformative applications based on Hadoop is tremendous,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera. “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.”

Validating the opportunity for Hadoop and Cloudera
Industry analysts who follow the market share different estimates on the market opportunity, but they agree on one thing, it’s growing fast. Many enterprises are re-architecting their data centers, emulating the web-scale companies who pioneered the use of open source software like Hadoop, combined with industry-standard hardware instead of dedicated engineered systems.

A few indicators of the growth of big data include these reports:

• Gartner estimates the market for data management infrastructure (database management systems including data warehousing, storage management, BI, ECM and data integration, and related systems as $74 billion in 2014, growing to $94 billion by 2017.
• IDC predicted the big data technology and services market will grow at a CAGR of 27% from 2012 to 2017, growing to $32.4 billion, and that the Internet of Things will generate 30 billion autonomously connected endpoints.
• Gartner predicted that big data would drive $232 billion in IT spending through 2016.
• IDC estimates that the amount of data in the world will grow fifty-fold from 2010 to 2020.

Cloudera pioneered the commercial Hadoop market, when it was founded in 2008. Today most industry analysts who follow big data would agree that Hadoop is the underlying technology behind a growing number of big data projects. Examples include web-scale properties that have pioneered the development and deployment of Hadoop in their data centers, and more frequently by enterprises who are rethinking their data centers. Although enterprises of any size will benefit by becoming more information-driven, today the greatest traction is occurring in large enterprises. They are gathering all their information and then extracting and quantifying those insights to push out in the form of new products and services. Many projects based on Hadoop, the standard for data management, start out small and grow over time.

Within the last year Cloudera brought to market its version of an enterprise data hub (EDH), a reference architecture based on Apache Hadoop surrounded with open source components. The EDH is a platform that plays a critical role in data management. A Cloudera-powered EDH is open source at the core, and has an open architecture which enables ISVs to integrate directly to the platform. That gives customers choice and flexibility. Since its founding, Cloudera has taken the lead to identify or found the projects and components that deliver a core platform and it has developed software that adds critical capabilities for security, data management and governance, which are essential for storing, accessing and using data.

“Intel’s sizable investment in Cloudera, alongside funding from institutional investors, Google Ventures and MSD Capital, are all indicative of both the very large market opportunity and the leadership position of Cloudera,” said Jim Frankola, CFO, Cloudera. “These investments give us significant financial resources to accelerate growth and deliver long-term sustainable value to our customers and partners.”

Cloudera will use the funding to:

• support the previously-announced collaboration agreement with Intel Corp.
• further drive the enterprise adoption of and innovation in Hadoop, to which it is the largest open source contributor, and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market
• support geographic expansion into Europe, Asia and now China through Intel’s market presence in that region
• expand its services and support capabilities for new open source projects, and
• scale the field and engineering organizations.

Dean Bradley Osborne Partners and Allen & Company served as financial advisers to Cloudera and assisted the company in arranging the financing.

The financing is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including applicable regulatory requirements.