April 30, 2014

The Intel investment in Cloudera

Intel recently made a huge investment in Cloudera, stated facts about which start:

Give or take stock preferences, etc., that’s around a $4.1 billion valuation post-money, but Cloudera does say it now has “most of $1 billion” in the bank.

Cloudera further told me when I visited last Friday that the majority of the Intel investment is net new money. (I presume that the rest of the round is net-new as well.) Hence, I conclude that previous investors sold in the aggregate less than 10% of total holdings to Intel. While I’m pretty sure Mike Olson is buying himself a couple of nice toys, in most respects it’s business-as-usual at Cloudera, with the same investors, directors and managers they had before. By way of contrast, many of the “cashing-out” rumors going around are OBVIOUSLY absurd, unless you think Intel acquired a much larger fraction of Cloudera than it actually did.

That said, Intel spent a lot of money, and in connection with the investment there’s a tight Cloudera/Intel partnership. In particular,

Notes on that include:

Medium-term Intel/Cloudera collaboration plans include looking for things to push down to the chip, such as:

I didn’t get into that in any detail with Cloudera, and am not sure I’m convinced yet much will come of it.

Finally, Cloudera and Intel will of course talk a lot about adapting to computer architecture opportunities and trends. I expect that part to go well, because Intel has strong relationships of that kind even with software companies it doesn’t own large percentages of.

Comments

5 Responses to “The Intel investment in Cloudera”

  1. Sebastian on May 1st, 2014 2:03 am

    I cannot find much about Intels Rhino – only dead links and empty Githubs. Is there really a prodcut behind it at current time or was that more a selling argument to get customers to sign a future benefit?

    Do you have any better insights there?

  2. Curt Monash on May 1st, 2014 3:02 am

    I’m sorry, Sebastian — I have nothing on Rhino that goes deeper than what’s known online.

  3. Chris Eastland on May 1st, 2014 10:40 am

    Last time we talked with Dell, they were saying they used Intel Hadoop as much as possible – and this was in the context of the North American market..

  4. Hardware and storage notes | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on May 2nd, 2014 12:21 am

    […] considering the use of their own non-Intel chip designs, which might be part of the reason for Intel’s large Hadoop investment. Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Buying processes, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, Intel, […]

  5. Hadoop: And then there were three | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on February 18th, 2015 4:50 pm

    […] the main point stands — big computer companies, such as IBM, EMC (Pivotal) and previously Intel, are figuring out that they can’t bigfoot something that started out as an elephant — […]

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