"The open-source, cross-platform software framework for storage and large-scale processing of data-sets of clusters of commodity hardware, Apache Hadoop, got a boost from Cloudera'˜s big data push to the tune of $160 million in funding. The money comes from various backers, and includes Google Ventures. Which begs the question: when will Cloudera go public?
Cute Logo, BIG Payoff
First a little bit about the company and what it does:
Cloudera builds and provides support tools that run on top of the Hadoop framework or ""platform"". Of all of the distributions of Hadoop (Hortonworks, MapR, and a joint venture of the EMC and VMWare - Pivotal) - Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop or CDH is arguably the most popular.
CDH helps businesses store and analyse data in Hadoop clusters, and includes support software for real-time SQL, search engine queries, security and stream and batch data processing.
Cloudera has some major industry believers and backers like Michael Dell and Google and possibly Intel (a rumored source of a major source of the funding.) T. Row Price secured the $160 million - and brings the total of venture funding to $300 million.
According to Google Ventures general partner Karim Faris: ""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. 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.""
And back to that nagging question of when will Cloudera go public? The company has a few hurdles to jump, but many industry insiders including the CEO of Cloudera, Tom Reilly, are making big speculations that the jump towards IPO will occur sometime before the end of the year.
Here are a few things to consider: Cloudera plans to grow from 540 employees to 800 by year-end. VC Experts found a Delaware filing that suggests a $1.8 billion valuation for the round, something that Tom Reilly is ""in the right ballpark.""
The CFO, Jim Frankola, has also been credited as part of the equation for when the IPO will occur, in this tongue-in-cheek quote between CEO and CFO:
Reilly: ""We'll do it as soon as my CFO gets off QuickBooks.""
Frankola: (laughs) ""We're putting in new systems this year, and want to let them run for a few quarters. Our sales force is probably six times the size as it was a year ago, so we have lots of new people and new layers of management. So we want to let everyone have some time with this new set-up, to make sure everything is smooth. ""
Cloudera does not speak publicly about its financial plan, but what happens in the future with Big Data's biggest fish will prove to be very interesting indeed.
The Java- based Apache Hadoop framework is composed of the following modules:
Hadoop Common - contains libraries and utilities needed by other Hadoop modules
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) - a distributed file-system that stores data on commodity machines, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster.
Hadoop YARN - a resource-management platform responsible for managing compute resources in clusters and using them for scheduling of users' applications.
Hadoop MapReduce - a programming model for large scale data processing.
Understand Hadoop Framework
For more information on Big Data and all thing data - center related visit www.datacenters.com."
