Cloudera is definitely a startup that will have many eyes fixed on it in the future. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, it’s doing interesting things with equally interesting open-source software. The company is today announcing the general availability of its flagship product, Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, in conjunction with a $5 million capital injection led by Accel Partners, where one of the founders was Entrepreneur in Residence.
Cloudera is pushing a commercial distribution for Hadoop, a free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data, technology that’s being put to use by Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, AOL, Baidu, The NY Times, Joost and many more.
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is distributed as a pre-packaged RPM bundle for Red Hat Linux systems or an Amazon EC2 image, for free under the Apache 2 software license. The startup is launching the my.cloudera.com portal today where people can use a Web-based configuration tool to create custom packages that are optimized to their specific needs.
There are some big names involved with Cloudera. The founding team at Cloudera includes Mike Olson (former VP at Oracle and prior to that CEO at open source database pioneer Sleepycat Software), Christophe Bisciglia (created and led Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative), Dr. Amr Awadallah (co-founder of VivaSmart, acquired by Yahoo!) and Jeff Hammerbacher (key member of the data team at Facebook).
Investors in and advisors to Cloudera include Diane Greene (formerly CEO VMware), Mike Abbott (senior VP, Palm), Caterina Fake (co-founder, Flickr), Dr. Qi Lu (president of the Online Services Group, Microsoft; former executive vice president, Yahoo!), Marten Mickos (former CEO, MySQL), Jeff Weiner (president, LinkedIn; former senior vice president, Yahoo!), Gideon Yu (Facebook CFO; former CFO at YouTube).
The NY Times broke the news on Cloudera’s launch, and offers some interesting tidbits on the side, like the fact that Google CEO Eric Schmidt himself gave the startup its blessing even though the company could make reasonable claims to IP ownership, and more information about Hadoop’s underlying technology.
Congratulations on the launch and the funding. This sounds like an exciting venture and the product is of definite interest to us. I am lookig forward to see where this is going.
Congrats to the funding, I am sure you can niceley work with the European German Guys of http://www.openmapi.org – I can introduce you
New venture with technolgy veterans always evokes lots of interest.
Keep It Small & Stupid.
These guys are EXPERTS at making 0 revenue!!
Wow.
The Sleepycat guy is a freaking genius at making no money, too.
Hadoop Distro…man I would pay exactly $0 for that.
Guess these guys are freaking brilliant tech guys with a track record of $0 revenue.
Silicon Valley you morons!!
Color me skeptic. This is like putting together a team of all-star players: Kobe, Shaq, etc. Remember the “dream team”? Yah, I thought so.
Startups don’t succeed because their founders have lots of gray hair. They succeed because their founders are *hungry*…. and these guys don’t look to hungry to me! (Except Amr, maybe; but then he’s probably looking for Doritos
).
I wish these guys all the luck, but I’m not so sure they’ll succeed.
I wish them the best. It’s nice to see anyone getting significant funding these days! Good luck guys!
I don’t get it.. so they are charging people what they can get for free.. Is it just a consulting like service ??
Yea, they’re going to need 5million to pay that executive team, WASTE.
seems abit like Parascale, sensible, good to see this is applicable with an EC2.
And I would pay these guys to install Hadoop for what reason??? Pretty much anybody can install it on their machines with the install scripts. You’d have to be an idiot to pay for this.
Think Commercial, I do think If Organizations need to deploy Cloudera, they would want a Readily accessible Knowledgeable Support channel, and not just that, some would need customized deployments and of course they would be willing to pay for it.
commercializing hadoop is cool on a superficial level, but as others here have said, anyone smart enough to use it can probably install it themselves on their own cluster (and probably prefers to)…and even this group of potential users is just microscopic…
yet another case of people fetishizing a tech that was never meant to be marketed on its own
Way too many negative comments here — just because you can get something for free does not mean that everybody wants to put the time into testing and certifying that the latest packaging works for them on their configuration — Linux works for free, but Red Hat has a nice business packing and certifying the builds before the roll out in big blue-chip installations.
All the best to you — good open source biz model — but probably not what is going to make you super rich.
Not a bad chunk of change! I hope it’s managed properly, which I’m sure it will be.
@Mr Anti-Negative: redhat doesn’t make money for packaging linux, they make money for support. if all you wanted was their “certified” linux, you could download centos
it’s an awesome team and an awesome company, the only thing missing from the line-up is enterprise architectural expertise…