Cloudera, Inc. is an American data lake software company.
History
Cloudera, Inc. was formed on June 27, 2008 in Burlingame, California by Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah, Jeff Hammerbacher, and chief executive Mike Olson.[3] Prior to Cloudera, Bisciglia, Awadallah, and Hammerbacher were engineers at Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook respectively,[3] and Olson was a database executive at Oracle after his previous company Sleepycat was acquired by Oracle in 2006.[4] The four were joined in 2009 by Doug Cutting, a co-founder of Hadoop.[5]
Cloudera originally offered a free product based on Hadoop, earning revenue by selling support and consulting services around it.[3] In March 2009, the company began offering a commercial distribution of Hadoop.[6]
In 2009 the company received a $5 million investment led by Accel Partners.[7] This was followed by a $25 million funding round in October 2010[8] and a $40M funding round in November 2011.[9]
In June 2013, Olson transitioned from CEO to Chairman of the Board and Chief Strategy Officer. Tom Reilly, former CEO of ArcSight, was appointed CEO.[10]
In March 2014, Cloudera raised another $160 million in funding from T. Rowe Price and other investors.[11][12][13]Intel invested $740 million in Cloudera for an 18% stake in the company (a $4.1 billion company valuation).[14] These shares were repurchased by Cloudera in December 2020 for $314 million.[15]
On April 28, 2017, the company became a public company via an initial public offering.[16] Over the next four years, the company's share price declined in the wake of falling sales figures[17] and competition from public cloud services like Amazon Web Services.[18] In October 2018, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced their merger,[19] which the two companies completed the following January.[20] Five months later, CEO Reilly and founder Olson left the company in June 2019. Board member Martin Cole was appointed as temporary CEO.[21]
In January 2020, former Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden was appointed as Cloudera's CEO.[22]
In October 2021, the company went private after an acquisition by KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in an all cash transaction valued at approximately $5.3 billion.[18]
In June 2024, Cloudera acquired Verta, a machine learning startup.[25]
Products and services
Cloudera provides the Cloudera Data Platform, a collection of products related to cloud services and data processing.[26][third-party source needed] Some of these services are provided through public cloud servers such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, while others are private cloud services that require a subscription. Cloudera markets these products for purposes related to machine learning and data analysis.[1]
Cloudera has adopted the marketing term "data lakehouse," which derives from a combination of the terms "data lake" and "data warehouse."[citation needed]