Intel Goes All-in with Cloudera, Making Large Investment

Intel (INTC) and Cloudera announced a broad strategic technology and business collaboration, as well as a significant equity investment from Intel, making it Cloudera's largest strategic shareholder. Intel says the investment in Cloudera is the single largest data center technology investment in its history.

A little over a year ago Intel entered the Hadoop market with its own Hadoop distribution, and recently expanded its portfolio with the Intel Data Platform. Last week Cloudera raised $160 million from T. Rowe Price, along with Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family.

The deal will join Cloudera's leading enterprise analytic data management software powered by Apache Hadoop with the leading data center architecture based on Intel Xeon technology. Cloudera will develop and optimize Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) for Intel architecture as its preferred platform and support a range of next-generation technologies including Intel fabrics, flash memory and security. In turn, Intel will market and promote CDH and Cloudera Enterprise to its customers as its preferred Hadoop platform. Intel will focus its engineering and marketing resources on the joint roadmap.

"By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. "We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business. This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things."

"Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer, Cloudera. "Based on our ability to store, process and analyze all kinds of data, increasingly in new ways, the potential for advances in business, social and economic environments are vast. Teaming with Intel, the industry leader in data center technology innovation, presents an opportunity for us to layer Hadoop into a platform's core framework. The result is rapid performance improvements on workloads such as those extracting intelligent insight. Intel's vision for delivering open, performance optimized solutions for big data is synergistic to our vision to help companies accelerate time to achieving success."

Intel's Diane Bryant and Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly discussed the importance of the technology and business collaboration between companies on this Bloomberg TV segment. Both the strategic collaboration and the equity investment are subject to standard closing conditions, including customary regulatory approvals.