According to GigaOM Cloudera received $6M in a B round which included existing investor Accel partners and other marque investors Greylock Partners, Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware) and Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL). Cloudera has an impressive team of entrepeneurs and academics, led by Michael Olsen, former CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, the open source embedded database engine. It was co-founded by Christophe Bisciglia who joined Cloudera from Google, where he created and managed their Academic Cloud Computing Initiative. I recently attended Christophe’s presentation on Cloudera at SDForum which was excellent. According to The Register, also part of the founding team is Dr. Amr Awadallah, a former Yahoo vice president of engineering that led the data warehousing and analytics effort behind that company’s mail, search, finance and news services; Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly of social networking giant Facebook and the manager who created the Hive project, which is a data warehousing layer that works in conjunction with Hadoop and that Facebook uses to do data analysis on its many petabytes of information stored in its user data warehouse. Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution, RPM deployment and automatic configuration, really takes the heavy lifting out of working with Hadoop. Cloudera has a similar business model to RedHat in that they provide support and training for revenues, based on a free software distribution model.
In a prior post I speculated about the momentum of Hadoop, MapReduce and other non-RDBMS databases for the cloud (See post Will Hadoop render Oracle Irelephant? Hadoop and MapReduce for beginners and non-techies.) If there was any doubt about whether there is interest in Hadoop and MapReduce, the funding of Cloudera in this challenging venture climate should act as a clear indicator that Hadoop means business, and so does Cloudera.
Congratulations to the Cloudera team, way to go!
MapReduce is NOT a database, relational or not!
I totally agree Jerome, but Hadoop in combination with MapReduce is being leveraged to solve Big Data problems, thereby offering an alternative to the different types of databases out there. The focus here is on the types of technologies that are being used to solve the problems and often Hadoop and MapReduce are competing against offerings such as Greenplum and Aster Data.