Cloudera, Focused on Hadoop, Grows Out its Partner Ecosystem

Providing evidence of how fast the Big Data space is growing, Cloudera, which specializes in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, has announced that its partner ecosystem grew more than 75 percent over the past year to include over 1,450 partners. In the past year, Cloudera announced new and expanded strategic partnerships with Accenture, Capgemini, Dell, EMC, Red Hat and many other companies. It also has previously announced alliances with Amazon, CenturyLink Technology Solutions, HP, IBM Softlayer, Oracle, SAS, Splunk, T-Systems, and VMware.

Cloudera's total ISV application and tools partners, companies that build applications that run on the platform, increased more than 60 percent to 267. System Integrators (SI) and solutions partners jumped 50 percent to 851. Cloudera says that it is working with SI partners on 18 industry solutions built on Cloudera, with more than 20 others in development. OEM application partners grew during the past year to 29--delivering full product solutions in verticals such as financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and technology.

Cloudera, of course, is not the only commercial enterprise focused on Hadoop. Hortonworks recently had a successful IPO, and has expanded its menu of training and support options for Hadoop.

Cloudera has shrewdly focused on certification programs and security, knowing that enteprises will demand hardened solutions surrounding Hadoop. Last Spring, Cloudera kicked off a partner product certification program, announcing at the time that it had already certified more than 100 products on its platform. Today that number is over 200, according to the company. Cloudera also reports that over 70 partner product certifications on Cloudera Enterprise 5 with security have been completed.

"We are extremely excited about the depth and breadth of our partner ecosystem," said Tim Stevens, vice president, Business and Corporate Development, Cloudera. "We're working with 13 of the 14 Leaders, Challengers and Visionaries in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platforms for 2014, 12 of whom are certified on Impala. Our partners play a key role in the direction of our business and they serve as the voice of the customer in many respects. We invest heavily in our partners - and we will continue to do so going forward."

 In addition to its momentum with partners, we reported last year that the company secured a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors, including Google Ventures.