Cloudera

Cloudera, Inc. is a US-based company that provides an enterprise data cloud. Built on open source technology, Cloudera’s platform uses analytics and machine learning to yield insights from data through a secure connection. Cloudera’s platform works across hybrid, multi-cloud and on-premises architectures and provides multi-function analytics throughout the edge to AI data lifecycle.

History

Cloudera was founded in 2008 by three engineers from Google, Yahoo! and Facebook (Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah and Jeff Hammerbacher, respectively) joined by a former Oracle executive (Mike Olson). Olson was the CEO of Sleepycat Software, the creator of the open-source embedded database engine Berkeley DB (acquired by Oracle in 2006). Awadallah was from Yahoo!, where he ran one of the first business units using Apache Hadoop for data analysis. At Facebook, Hammerbacher used Hadoop for building analytic applications involving massive volumes of user data. Architect Doug Cutting, also a former chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, authored the open-source Lucene and Nutch search technologies before he and Mike Cafarella wrote the initial Hadoop software in 2004. He designed and managed a Hadoop storage and analysis cluster at Yahoo! before joining Cloudera in 2009. The chief operating officer was Kirk Dunn until 2015.

In March 2009, Cloudera announced the availability of Cloudera Distribution Including Apache Hadoop in conjunction with a $5 million investment led by Accel Partners. In 2011, the company raised a further $40 million from Ignition Partners, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm with open connections to the CIA.

In January 2012, Oracle Corporation announced a partnership with Cloudera for its Oracle Big Data Appliance. In January 2013, Dell announced a partnership with Cloudera.

In March 2013, Intel invested $740 million in Cloudera for an 18% investment. In May 2013, SAS Institute announced a partnership.

In June 2013, Tom Reilly became chief executive, although Olson remained as chairman of the board and chief strategist. Reilly was chief executive at ArcSight when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2010. In March 2014 Cloudera announced a $900 million funding round, led by Intel Capital ($740 million), for which Intel received an 18% share in Cloudera and Intel dropped its own Hadoop distribution and dedicated 70 Intel engineers to work exclusively on Cloudera projects. Additional funds came from T Rowe Price; Google Ventures; an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell; and others.

In June 2014, Accenture announced a service offering based on Cloudera. In June 2014, Cloudera acquired Gazzang, which developed encryption and key management software. In October 2014, Cloudera announced the first Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) with MasterCard.

In February 2015, Deloitte announced an alliance with Cloudera. In May 2015, Capgemini announced a marketing program for SAP HANA and Cloudera. On June 30, 2015, Kyvos Insights announced a Big Data BI Acceleration Layer based on its breakthrough OLAP on Big Data technology. On July 9, 2015, Cloudera announced a partnership with Teradata.

In September 2015, Cloudera announced the Kudu storage manager. In September 2015, Microsoft Azure announced full support of Cloudera Enterprise. In January 2016, Tata Consultancy Services announced an Internet of things framework based on Cloudera for sensor data analytics.

In February 2016, EMC announces evolution in advanced storage with DSSD support for Cloudera In 2016, Cloudera was ranked #5 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.

Cloudera filed for an initial public offering in March 2017, and on April 28, 2017, its shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CLDR.

In September 2017, Cloudera acquired Fast Forward Labs (FFL), a leading machine learning and applied artificial intelligence research and development company in an effort to deepen Cloudera’s expertise in the application of machine learning to practical business problems. The new division is headed up by FFL co-founder and CEO Hilary Mason.

In October 2018, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced they would be merging in an all-stock merger of equals.[36] The merger completed in January 2019.

On June 21, 2019, Cloudera and IBM announced a strategic partnership to "offer an industry-leading, enterprise-grade Big Data distribution plus an ecosystem of integrated products and services – all designed to help organizations achieve faster analytic results at scale."

On September 4, 2019, Cloudera announced they would be acquiring Arcadia Data, a provider of cloud-native AI-powered business intelligence and real-time analytics.[40] On September 16, 2019, Cloudera conducted a survey with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services to examine the trends, pain points, and opportunities surrounding Enterprise IT challenges in data analytics and management in a multicloud environment. On September 24, 2019, Cloudera launched the first enterprise data cloud.

On January 13, 2020, Cloudera announced that Rob Bearden would be appointed as the President and CEO of the company. On August 4, 2020, Sarah Shin was made the Chief Diversity Officer of Cloudera. On January 7, 2021, Cloudera appointed Gary Hu to its Board of Directors.

On May 6, 2020, Cloudera released an expanded set of production machine learning capabilities for MLOps available in Cloudera Machine Learning. On June 11, 2020, Cloudera made available the Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud. On August 18, 2020, the Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud was made open for general availability. On September 17, 2020, the Cloudera Data Platform was updated with the CDP Data Engineering, CDP Operational Database, and CDP Data Visualization services. On December 23, 2020, Cloudera announced they would buy back $314 million of shares from Intel, "likely booking a substantial paper loss for the chip giant on its investment."

On June 1, 2021, private equity companies KKR and Clayton Dubilier & Rice agreed to purchase Cloudera and take the company private, for approximately $5.3 billion, paying $16 per share.