Cloudera Ask Bigger Questions

Big Data is the hot topic these days and Cloudera is a pioneer in the Hadoop-based Big Data space.
They have a great management team sitting on a giant VC cash pile two things desired by every
start-up aiming for success.
Founded in 2008, Cloudera provides Big Data platform based on Hadoop. Its headquarters is in Palo
Alto, California. CEO Mike Olson, was the former CEO of Sleepycat Software. Oracle acquired his
embedded database company in 2006 and he was VP, Embedded Technologies at Oracle for 2 years.
Till date, Cloudera has been able to raise $140 million as venture capital funding. Accel Partners, In-
Q-Tel, Ignition Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners are its investors.
Cloudera helps users query their structured and unstructured data. The user is able to get a clearer
picture than one would get from relational databases. They launched Impala, an open-source
interactive query engine for Hadoop that assists in real-time interactive querying on massive data
sets.
There is immense market potential with forecasts from Gartner saying that Big Data will drive $232
billion in IT spending by 2016 and Embedded Hadoop will be involved in 65 percent of packaged
analytic applications by 2015.
Despite having the first-mover advantage in this field, there are competitors coming closer which are
MapR, EMC, Pivotal and Hortonworks. Intel just entered the fray, as well. Its customers include CBS
Interactive, Monsanto, eBay, Samsung and Expedia.
It has been doing well for long enough, to be moved out of the start-up realm and considered a big
player.


MapR Technologies

With a good VC backing and a CEO who knows how to drive start-ups smoothly to successful exits,
MapR is another promising player providing a Hadoop/NoSQL Big Data platform founded in 2009. Its
headquarters is in San Jose, California. Its CEO is John Schroeder, who had two start-ups - Calista
Technologies and Rainfinity acquired by Microsoft and EMC respectively.
It has a total VC funding of $110 million today with investors like Google Capital, Mayfield Fund (put
in $30 million in 2013), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and NEA.
MapR's unified Big Data platform merges Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications.
With speed not being the strong point about Hadoop platforms, the company claims to have won
over the speed weak point. It also offers enterprise-grade features like "high availability, real-time
streaming, standard file-based access through NFS, full database access through ODBC, business
continuity and support for mission-critical SLAs."
Competitors include Hortonworks, Cloudera, Pivotal, EMC and Intel. Named customers include
Samsung, Beats Music, TransUnion, Ancestry, Rebicon and comScore.



LucidWorks
IT companies today are dealing with gigantic magnitudes of data. The amount is nothing like they
have gathered before. Making use of this data is way more complex than collecting it. Accessing Big
Data will require enterprise search and doing it in such a way that other applications can also use.
LucidWorks, founded in 2008 and headquartered in Redwood City, California provides just this -
enterprise search tools to help navigate Big Data. The CEO, Paul Doscher has experience of running
companies like Exalead and JasperSoft.
With support from Walden International, Granite Ventures, Shasta Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the total
funding is $16 million.
LucidWorks Search provides easy access to open-source search technologies by enabling developers
to build scalable, highly secure and cost-effective search applications.
Built on Apache open-source projects, LucidWorks Big Data is an app development platform allows
organizations to quickly discover, access and evaluate great volumes of structured and unstructured
data.
Its competitors are Autonomy, Endeca and Elasticsearch. Sears, ADP, Verizon, Taser,
MotleyFool.com are its customers.


Vance, Jeff. (June 12, 2013). 10 Hot Big Data Start-ups to Watch. Retrieved August 13, 2014, from
http://www.cio.com/article/2384982/big-data/10-hot-big-data-startups-to-watch.html
Press, Gil. (October 30, 2013). Top 10 Most Funded Big Data Start-ups (Updated). Retrieved August
13, 2014, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2013/10/30/top-10-most-funded-big-data-
startups-updated/