Hadoop-Centric Cloudera Gets $6 Million in Series B Funding

As GigaOm reports: "Cloudera, a Burlingame, Calif.-based start-up that is building commercial services around open source software framework Hadoop, has closed $6 million in Series B funding, bringing the total raised by the company to $11 million. The latest round of funding was led by Greylock Partners. Current investor Accel Partners also participated in this round." This is another sign that venture capital is flowing more freely toward open source now, and good news for Cloudera and its Red Hat-like business model.

In March, we covered Cloudera and its $5 million round of Series A funding, led by Accel partners. The company is using a proven open source business model, delivering a Hadoop-centric software distribution for free, and charging for support, training and consulting services based on the number of Hadoop servers and the size of the data sets managed. The company also packages utilities with its distribution that make managing Hadoop easier.

As we covered here, Hadoop is increasingly being used by companies and organizations to leverage huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries and more. We also covered some of the movers and shakers surrounding Hadoop (which underlies Yahoo's searches) in this post.

According to a post from Cloudera, Hadoop:

"...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 is one of a growing number of commercial open source companies betting on support and training for revenues, based on a free software distribution model. That's the model that Red Hat has successfully deployed around Linux, and is the model that Eucalyptus Systems has adopted in the cloud computing arena. Judging from the amount of venture capital Cloudera has gathered at this point, the model appears to be working again. Look for more commercial open source companies to sprout up using a similar business model.