Big Data Experts Cloudera To Open European HQ In The UK

Doug Cutting’s Hadoop powerhouse is coming to London

Cloudera, the US startup that specialises in software based on Apache Hadoop framework, has announced it will open its European headquarters in the UK early next year.

The company – which employs Hadoop co-creator Doug Cutting (pictured)  as its architect – has just closed $65 million in a new funding round, to help fuel the European expansion and continue the development of the Big Data processing tools.

Another US Big Data company, MapR, has announced plans to open a London office last week, and analysts predict that the other big player Hortonworks will follow suit.

Big choice for Big Data

Cloudera was founded in 2009 by people who have previously worked for Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Oracle. It counts Doug Cutting, the creator of Hadoop and the current chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, as its chief software architect.

Cloudera’s CDH4 is the most widely deployed commercial distribution of Hadoop, with customers such as eBay, Morgan Stanley, Nokia, RIM and The Walt Disney Company all relying on it for distributed computing applications.

The company says it has more than doubled its sales, number of customers, employees and the amount of data under management in the past year. To support this growth, Cloudera just added another $65 million of financing to the $40 million of venture capital raised in 2011.

“This new investment will speed the expansion of our sales and support operations to meet increasing enterprise demand for our real-time, Hadoop-based platform, as we scale to address the enormity of this global market opportunity,” said CEO Mike Olson.

Late last week, the company finally announced a long-rumoured move to open its first European base in the UK. This will happen in the first quarter of 2013, but the numberof  employees and the primary functions of the London office remain unknown.

“Four years ago, Cloudera set out to pioneer the business case for Apache Hadoop in the enterprise. The team succeeded in developing the market’s leading platform for Big Data and has become the go-to technology for enterprise Hadoop Infrastructure, supported by its rich and diverse partner ecosystem,” said Ping Li, partner at Accel Partners, one of the venture funds that bankrolls Cludera.

“The company is accelerating on its position as the standard for Hadoop in the enterprise and is well positioned to expand its revenue and global customer footprint,” he added.

Earlier this year, Cloudera partnered with Oracle to launch the Oracle Big Data Appliance, designed to provision a highly available and scalable system for managing and analysing massive amounts of data in Hadoop.

And in October, the company made its platform much more responsive with the help of ‘Project Impala’ – a speedy parallel query engine which operates in real-time.

December 10, 2012 by Max Smolaks, Techweek