Cloudera’s Big Data Growth Story

In a report published by IDC earlier this year, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012-2016 Forecast, the worldwide big data technology and services market is projected to grow annually at 31% to be worth $23.8 billion by 2016. This is a conservative estimate compared with Wikibon’s research, which projects the big data market to be worth $50 billion by the year 2017, up from $11.4 billion last year.

Cloudera’s Financials

Among the few pure-play big data vendors in existence, private startup Cloudera ranks in the top five. They help distribute Hadoop and provide services such as training, design, and implementation assistance and technical support that help with the deployment of Hadoop.

Analysts believe that it won’t be long before Cloudera lists on the stock exchange. Until then, Cloudera is expanding through venture funding. To date, they have received $141 million in funding from investors that include 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. Their latest round of funding from existing investors was held in December 2012. It helped them raise $65 million, pegging their value at $700 million.

Cloudera does not disclose their financial performance. They earn revenues by selling software that runs on top of Hadoop and through subscription services to support their customers. According to estimates, though, Cloudera is estimated to be operating at annual revenue run rates of more than $100 million. Today, they have more than 130 customers with names like AOL, CBS, eBay, and The Walt Disney Company, to name a few.

Cloudera’s Expanding Offerings

Cloudera continues to innovate with their product offerings. Last quarter, they released the industry’s first real-time query engine for Hadoop. The offering performs batch and real-time operations on both structured and unstructured data, thus improving the economics and performance of large-scale data management in the enterprise. Using the new service, Cloudera’s customers will be able to process data on a petabyte scale and conduct real-time analysis.

Besides product innovation, Cloudera has also managed to maintain their strong foothold in the market through multiple tie-ups with other technology vendors. Last year, they partnered with Oracle to distribute their services with Oracle’s Big Data Appliance. As part of the agreement, Oracle integrated Cloudera’s offerings into their Big Data Appliance to offer a product that will deliver high performance and scalable data processing environments for big data. Through the use of Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, organizations will be able to acquire, organize, and analyze big data.

While the market may be waiting for their IPO, Cloudera has yet to confirm any plans. In an article published in the fall of 2012, COO Kirk Dunn said that they “are not really thinking about [an IPO] right now.” However, the recent hiring of a new CFO, ex-IBM employee Jim Frankola, leads many to believe that Cloudera may be looking for an IPO in the next 12 months.