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Cloudera's Biz Model: Supporting Hadoop

We've covered Hadoop on a few occasions here at OStatic. Sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation, Hadoop is a software framework able to take advantage of huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries and more, by breaking them into parts. Yahoo makes extensive use of Hadoop for its search features. Now, as Valleywag is reporting, a veteran of Bear Stearns and Facebook is one of the folks behind Cloudera, a business focusing on supporting Hadoop deployments.

Valleywag reports:

"I'm confident that the founders of Cloudera will make tons of money, if only for this reason: Its data guru, Jeff Hammerbacher, worked on credit derivatives at Bear Stearns before he left and joined Facebook. He joined the social network in time for its notional value to soar to $15 billion."

Hmm, those are good resume notches, but I'm not sure they'll guarantee Cloudera's success on their own. There may be some other reasons why Cloudera could have a fighting chance, though.

As we covered here, Hadoop is a complex and powerful framework. It has a distributed file system designed to use thousands of computers at once to make complex tasks execute quickly, and an increasing number of businesses and institutions are depending on it.

According to Cloudera's home page:

"It allows you to explore complex, non-relational data in its native form, using custom analyses tailored to exactly the information and questions you have. Hadoop has been used in production by the largest Web properties in the world to process petabytes of data. Hadoop delivers insights you simply can't get with other analytical tools."

Cloudera's intent is to help with installing, configuring and running Hadoop, counting on Red Hat-type revenues gained from paid support for a free and open source software platform. The secret to Red Hat's successful implementation of that model has been getting large companies to buy into support and services, and then retaining them. Red Hat has an extraordinary customer retention rate for its largest 25 accounts. If Cloudera hopes to succeed, hooking up with large-scale Hadoop implementers and retaining them as customers will probably be the order of the day.

• yahoo
• Hadoop
• Cloudera

by License Raj on Oct. 14, 2008

Don't count on it. Look at what Sun tried to do in the high-end computing arena and is rethinking that whole model. Don't get me wrong...There is a lot of value in what Hadoop is doing but getting companies to buy into this will be tough and the potential universe of customers is very limited - making it that much more difficult to execute. Plus, don't forget the competition...

2 Votes

by an anonymous user on Oct. 14, 2008

Christophe Bisciglia, one of the gurus of the large-scale computing efforts @ Google is also part of the founding team. I'm sure he will bring a lot of credibility and innovation to the table...

0 Votes

by Paul Sands on Oct. 14, 2008

@Licensing Raj: I don't necessarily agree with your argument. Looking at all the infrastructure already in place (Amazon (EC2), Google, IBM, etc.) coupled with technologies like Hadoop would make for a very compelling value proposition for large R&D operations (Pharma, Semiconductors, Manufacturing, Academia, Defense, etc. etc.)

1 Votes

by Sam Dean on Oct. 15, 2008

Yep, there are other distinguished members among the Cloudera founders. As far as whether what Cloudera is doing will work, I think it depends on how long they can last trying. Hadoop is seriously cool open source technology. Many sites could begin to rely on it, and if support is priced right as this plays out, that could work. For now, Hadoop is esoteric. At Yahoo, they support their Hadoop effort by trying to find isolated experts. At the Hadoop event mentioned in this post, I did hear from members of the Yahoo team saying they're "on the lookout" for people who know Hadoop. So Cloudera could make some inroads there.

Sam

0 Votes

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