Intel Makes “Significant” Investment in Cloudera

Intel Corporation and Cloudera, Inc. announced a broad strategic technology and business collaboration, as well as a significant equity investment from Intel making it Cloudera’s largest strategic shareholder and a member of its board of directors.

This is Intel’s single largest data center technology investment in its history. The deal will join Cloudera’s enterprise analytic data management software powered by Apache Hadoop with the 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.

Both the strategic collaboration and the equity investment are subject to standard closing conditions, including customary regulatory approvals.

Cloudera will develop and optimize Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) for Intel architecture as its preferred platform and support a range of 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. The optimizations from 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.

The collaboration with Cloudera promises to enhance both Intel data center and Internet of Things (IoT) technology initiatives by enabling customers to manage and analyze machine-generated data from a variety of sources, spanning sensors to gateways and a range of devices.

“By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics,” said Diane Bryant, senior VP and GM, 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.”

Both companies remain committed to the open source community that has been the driving force behind Hadoop. The companies will also execute joint go-to-market strategies that include coordinated product, channel and sales programs.

“Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data,” said Tom Reilly, CEO, 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.”

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Cloudera Raises as Much as $160 Million in Just One Round
Total at $301 million