Cloudera the Next Splunk?

The recent successful IPO by big data player Splunk has sparked interest in some other, albeit smaller, players in the market. According to a recent report by open source analyst and researcher, Wikibon, the big data hardware and software market is estimated to be worth $5 billion. The market size is projected to grow annually at 58% for the next five years to be worth $50 billion by 2017. Cloudera plays its part as an active contributor to Hadoop, an open source framework that is considered to be among one of the biggest approaches for processing, storing and analyzing Big Data.

Cloudera’s Financials
Wikibon estimates that pure-play big data vendors, account for $311 million in revenues. They define pure play vendors as those independent players who cater to the big data software and hardware requirements and earn more than half of their revenues from this segment. Private start-up Cloudera, is among the top five pure-play big data vendors.

Cloudera was founded in 2008 by on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop and provides services catered around Hadoop deployment. Their services include comprehensive training sessions, architectural and implementation help, and technical support for Hadoop clusters in development or in production.

They do not disclose their financials, but Wikibon estimates that in 2011, they owned 6% of the pure-play market share with revenues of $18 million. To date, Cloudera has received $76 million in funding with investors including Accel Partners, Diane Greene, Qi Lu, Jeff Weiner, Marten Mickos, Gideon Yu, Caterina Fake, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel and Ignition Partners. In 2010, they had been valued at $100 million, a number they have surely outgrown since.

Cloudera’s Partnerships
Despite their small revenues, Cloudera boasts some big clients and partners. Earlier this year, Oracle teamed up with Cloudera to integrate Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop distribution and other services with a newly announced big data Appliance. Prior to the recent engagement, Cloudera distributed an Oracle connector for Hadoop.

Last month, IBM, too, announced a partnership with Cloudera to integrate Cloudera’s distribution including Apache Hadoop and Cloudera Manager with IBM’s big data platform to deliver a solution for big data analytics. The integrated solution will provide IBM BigInsights with higher performance, scalability and platform extensibility and improved analytics solution through BI capabilities and connectors to IBM’s analytics system.

For now, analysts are counting on Cloudera being the next Splunk. However, some also expect that their current engagement with Oracle could make them  a potential target for Oracle.