The Intel investment in Cloudera
Intel recently made a huge investment in Cloudera, stated facts about which start:
- $740 million …
- … for 18% of the company …
- … as part of an overall $900 million round.
- SEC filings coming soon with more details.
Give or take stock preferences, etc., that’s around a $4.1 billion valuation post-money, but Cloudera does say it now has “most of $1 billion” in the bank.
Cloudera further told me when I visited last Friday that the majority of the Intel investment is net new money. (I presume that the rest of the round is net-new as well.) Hence, I conclude that previous investors sold in the aggregate less than 10% of total holdings to Intel. While I’m pretty sure Mike Olson is buying himself a couple of nice toys, in most respects it’s business-as-usual at Cloudera, with the same investors, directors and managers they had before. By way of contrast, many of the “cashing-out” rumors going around are OBVIOUSLY absurd, unless you think Intel acquired a much larger fraction of Cloudera than it actually did.
That said, Intel spent a lot of money, and in connection with the investment there’s a tight Cloudera/Intel partnership. In particular,
- Cloudera will move rapidly to make its Hadoop distribution be a superset of Intel’s.
- When that is accomplished, Intel will get out of the Hadoop distribution business, and Cloudera will take over Intel’s Hadoop customers, which I still think are concentrated in Asia, especially China and India.
Notes on that include:
- All of the above is planned to take place by the end of 2014.
- The biggest case of Intel technology superseding/subsuming Cloudera’s will be security. (I.e., Cloudera Sentry will become a subset of Rhino.)
- Intel’s Hadoop engineers will remain Intel employees.
Medium-term Intel/Cloudera collaboration plans include looking for things to push down to the chip, such as:
- Encryption/decryption.
- Compression/decompression.
- Math.
I didn’t get into that in any detail with Cloudera, and am not sure I’m convinced yet much will come of it.
Finally, Cloudera and Intel will of course talk a lot about adapting to computer architecture opportunities and trends. I expect that part to go well, because Intel has strong relationships of that kind even with software companies it doesn’t own large percentages of.
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I cannot find much about Intels Rhino – only dead links and empty Githubs. Is there really a prodcut behind it at current time or was that more a selling argument to get customers to sign a future benefit?
Do you have any better insights there?
I’m sorry, Sebastian — I have nothing on Rhino that goes deeper than what’s known online.
Last time we talked with Dell, they were saying they used Intel Hadoop as much as possible – and this was in the context of the North American market..
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