Cloudera is on a roll in the hot market to bring the Apache Hadoop framework to businesses to handle big data, scoring $65 million in venture funding.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup will use the cash infusion to make the best of what Alan Saldich, vice president of marketing at Cloudera, on Friday called "a huge opportunity" in the burgeoning big data field.
Cloudera already has a partner program of almost 450 companies, including large system integrators such as Capgemini and Accenture, and resellers such as Oracle, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
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But, the company is planning a significant expansion of the program in the coming months to create opportunities for smaller-sized solution providers, Saldich said.
"We are making an effort to build out the channel, but I don't think it's ready yet for small VARs to take on," Saldich said. "At the moment we're working with larger resellers.
"We're going to be making the channel program more robust and refined," Saldich added. "It's been forming in the last year, and it will become more defined for VARs in the next six months."
Apache Hadoop is the open-source software framework that supports the data-intensive applications that are essential for cloud computing. A large market is growing to serve the need to handle these large, complex data sets, including the need to capture, manage and analyze data.
"The amount of data in the world has outstripped the ability of companies to deal with it," said Saldich.
Cloudera sells a commercial distribution of the Apache Hadoop software, along with Cloudera Enterprise, a subscription service offering support, and Cloudera Management Suite.
Cloudera is in a crowded field of companies serving the big data market. Competitors include Hortonworks, with its Data Platform 1.0 for commercial big data based on Apache Hadoop, and MapR Technologies, with M7, its big data platform to boost HBase, the non-relational database developed as part of Apache Hadoop.
The funding round for Cloudera was led by Accel Partners, with participation from Ignition Partners, Greylock Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners, the company said. The company will also expand internationally, opening a European headquarters in the U.K. in early 2013.
"The [Cloudera] team succeeded in developing the market's leading platform for Big Data and has become the go-to technology for enterprise Hadoop Infrastructure, supported by its rich and diverse partner ecosystem," Ping Li, a partner at Accel Partners and head of the Accel Big Data Fund, said in a statement Thursday. "The company is accelerating on its position as the standard for Hadoop in the enterprise and is well positioned to expand its revenue and global customer footprint."
PUBLISHED DEC. 7, 2012
This story was updated on Dec. 13, 2012, at 3:20pm PST, to reflect that Cloudera is located in Palo Alto, Calif., and not Boston, Mass.
