The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users A campaign to put Hadoop at the center of the enterprise just got a shot in the arm this week in the form of $160 million in additional funding being raised by Cloudera. Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly says a large portion of those funds, a significant […]
The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users
A campaign to put Hadoop at the center of the enterprise just got a shot in the arm this week in the form of $160 million in additional funding being raised by Cloudera.
Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly says a large portion of those funds, a significant amount of which came from Google and the Michael Dell family, will be applied to research that will make it simpler to integrate the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop with the rest of an enterprise IT environment using both ODBC and JDBC connectors alongside Hadoop application programming interfaces.
The goal, says Reilly, is to move Hadoop to the center of the enterprise to provide an “active archive” that feeds data to any number of enterprise applications. All told, Reilly says there are four primary use cases for Hadoop in the enterprise. The first is to provide a landing zone in which raw data can be cost-effectively stored in its native format. The second is to transform that data into a structured format that can be persistently stored. The third is to enable users to make use of SQL and enterprise search tools to directly interrogate and explore that data, and finally, converged analytics of both unstructured and structured data.
Reilly says that as Hadoop evolves into becoming a data hub, both batch-oriented and real-time applications will be developed. For that reason, Cloudera has embraced a Spark real-time engine that allows Hadoop to run in-memory, says Reilly.
Cloudera, which has existing partnerships with Oracle and Dell, has now garnered a total of $300 million in funding. Reilly says this latest investment will make it possible for Cloudera to one day go public on its own terms. In the meantime, Reilly concedes that there is likely to be some consolidation activity across a Hadoop distribution landscape that includes rival platforms from IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Hortonworks. But ultimately, Reilly says there will only be a handful of distributions of Hadoop that will serve as the foundation for a set of technologies that are starting to transform enterprise IT architecture from the data layer up.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
The go-to resource for IT professionals from all corners of the tech world looking for cutting edge technology solutions that solve their unique business challenges. We aim to help these professionals grow their knowledge base and authority in their field with the top news and trends in the technology space.
Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.
