Cloudera

Cloudera was founded on June 27, 2008 in Burlingame, California by three engineers with big-data pedigrees from top internet companies — Christophe Bisciglia (Google), Amr Awadallah (Yahoo!), and Jeff Hammerbacher (Facebook) — together with database industry veteran Mike Olson, who had previously led Sleepycat Software (acquired by Oracle in 2006) and served as an Oracle executive. The founders set out to commercialize Apache Hadoop, the open-source distributed-computing framework that Yahoo! and others had built to process massive datasets. Hadoop creator Doug Cutting joined Cloudera in 2009, further cementing the company's role at the center of the open-source big-data ecosystem. Cloudera began selling a commercial Hadoop distribution with support and consulting in 2009, and grew through a series of venture rounds (Accel-led Series A in 2009, a Series B round in which Greylock Partners invested around 2010, and later rounds bringing in Meritech Capital, T. Rowe Price, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel and others) into the dominant independent Hadoop distribution vendor, competing chiefly with Hortonworks and MapR.

A pivotal moment came in March 2014, when Intel Capital invested $740 million for an 18% stake, valuing Cloudera at roughly $4.1 billion and giving Cloudera access to Intel's engineering resources and enterprise relationships (Intel's stake was later repurchased by Cloudera for about $314 million in December 2020). Mike Olson stepped down as CEO in 2013, moving to Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, and was succeeded by Tom Reilly, former CEO of security firm ArcSight. Under Reilly, Cloudera completed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange on April 28, 2017 under ticker CLDR, pricing 15 million shares at $15 (above its expected range) to raise roughly $225 million, before popping to around $18 on debut.

As a public company, Cloudera faced intensifying competition from cloud-native data platforms (notably Snowflake and, increasingly, Databricks) and from public cloud providers' native big-data services. In October 2018 Cloudera announced an all-stock 'merger of equals' with rival Hortonworks, which closed on January 3, 2019, consolidating the two largest independent Hadoop vendors into a single 'Cloudera Data Platform' business. Leadership churned in this period: Tom Reilly departed in 2019 (with Martin Cole serving as temporary CEO), and Rob Bearden — the former CEO of Hortonworks — took over as Cloudera's CEO in January 2020, steering the company's shift toward a unified hybrid/multi-cloud data platform and acquiring cloud-native assets such as Datacoral and Cazena.

Business model

Enterprise software subscriptions (hybrid/multi-cloud data platform), public cloud consumption-based services, and professional/support services.

Subscription licensing of its data platform plus cloud consumption fees, supplemented by professional services, training, and support contracts.