Cash and Development Resources are Heading Fast for Hadoop
June and July brought lots of big news surrounding enterprise analytic data management powered by the open source Hadoop platform. Cloudera, focused on supporting enterprise Hadoop, announced in June that it raised a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. It also firmed up a partnership with Dell and Intel to launch a dedicated Dell In-Memory Appliance for Cloudera Enterprise that facilitates Hadoop-driven analytics.
Hewlett-Packard is also investing $50 in Hadoop distributor Hortonworks, and the companies will work together on sales and incorporate the Hortonworks Hadoop distribution into HP’s data processing stack, called HAVEn. Meanwhile, Pivotal is also teaming with Hortonworks to advance the Apache Ambari project, open source software used by Hortonworks to manage and monitor Hadoop clusters.
In addition to HP's investment and engineering commitment, HP Chief Technology Officer Martin Fink will also join Hortonworks' Board of Directors.
On the Pivotal deal with Hortonworks, InformationWeek has reported:
"Pivotal said its pledge to collaborate with Hortonworks on Ambari is in keeping with its open source credentials and contributions to Cloud Foundry, Redis, Spring XD, and RabbitMQ, and with its 'deep commitment' to Apache Hadoop."
As reported here yesterday, people in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are also becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. According to Apache, Spark can run programs up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and ten times faster on disk. Some are actually calling Apache Spark "the next big thing in Big Data."
Cloudera has had many big Hadoop announcements recently, and is flush with $900 million of VC money to advance its efforts. As Matt Asay has noted, regarding Intel's increasing role with Cloudera:
"The big news in Cloudera's flurry of announcements is actually its partnership with Intel, which the company hopes will make Cloudera's Hadoop distribution the heart of the Big Data uprising. Intel used to have its own Hadoop distribution, but last week, Intel dumped its home-grown distribution to adopt Cloudera's. While $900 million is a lot of money, it pales in comparison to the mountains of cash both Cloudera and Intel expect to make through their partnership."
“The market opportunity for companies to gain insight and build transformative applications based on Hadoop is tremendous,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, in a statement. “Clearly, demand is accelerating and the market is poised for growth.”