Intel is making a significant equity investment in Apache hadoop big data company Cloudera. The investment, Intel’s single largest data center technology investment ever, makes the chipmaker Cloudera’s largest strategic shareholder. Intel will also be getting a seat on the Cloudera board.  

Diane Bryant (Senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel): We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business.

Cloudera will develop and optimize Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) for Intel architecture as its preferred platform and support a range of next-generation technologies including Intel fabrics, flash memory and security. In turn, Intel will market and promote CDH and Cloudera Enterprise to its customers as its preferred Hadoop platform. Intel will focus its engineering and marketing resources on the joint roadmap.  The companies will also execute joint go-to-market strategies that include coordinated product, channel and sales programs.  

The optimizations from Intel’s Distribution for Apache Hadoop/Intel Data Platform (IDH/IDP) will be integrated into CDH and IDH/IDP and will be transitioned after v3.1 release at the end of March. Intel and Cloudera will work together on a migration path from IDH/IDP as well.

Tom Reilly (Chief executive officer, Cloudera): Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data.

Both companies remain committed to the open source community that has been the driving force behind Hadoop.

Both the strategic collaboration and the equity investment are subject to standard closing conditions, including customary regulatory approvals.

[Image courtesy: Cloudera]