Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) announced that it made a significant equity investment and entered into a broad strategic business and technology collaboration with Cloudera, a commercial Hadoop startup engaged in developing open source software that powers data processing engines of popular websites.
Single largest data technology investment
According to Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), it is now the largest strategic shareholder and a member of the board of directors of Cloudera. The world’s largest chip maker did not disclose the amount of its investment in the startup. However, the company emphasized that it is the “single largest data center technology investment” it made in its history.
Creating platform of choice for big data analytics
Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Data Center Group at Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) said, “By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics.”
The partnership between Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) and Cloudera will combine the startup’s top enterprise analytic data management software powered by Apache Hadoop and the chip maker’s leading data center architecture based on Intel Xeon technology.
“This collaboration spans our data center technology from computer to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things,” added Bryant. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) expects to speed up the industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and allow companies to mine their data insights.
On the other hand, Tom Reilly, chief executive officer of Cloudera emphasized that Hadoop changed the entire conversation around data. He added that the potential for improvements in business, social, and economic environments are huge based on Cloudera’s ability to store, process and analyze all types of data.
Reilly said, “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.”
Other investors
Last month, Cloudera received $160 million in funding from other investors including T. Rowe Price Group Inc (NASDAQ:TROW) and Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). The startup is planning to go public this year.
