The race toward big data has every company with a hand in application deployment or development paying attention to the activity and the stakes. The enterprise that wants to set itself above the competition seeks to capture as much data as possible to use to its benefit. The small business seeking to grow will rely on data to get a better handle on the market and the competition. For companies like Intel (News - Alert), it means making sound investments.
Along those same lines, Intel is expanding its ownership in the market. The company recently purchased several hundred million dollars’ worth of Cloudera stock. This player in the big data segment is on pace for an IPO, something Intel likely had in mind with this move. According to a recent blog by application deployment company Unicom Engineering, this makes Intel the biggest single investor in the company and is sure to land them a seat on the board once the company is public.
Still a young company, Cloudera is based in Silicon Valley and produces an enterprise version of Hadoop. Those in the big data space are readily familiar with this open source program that was developed to process big data. The program is widely popular and even preferred by developers, creating significant market opportunity for Cloudera and its investors. The goal is to keep the platform open source. Intel’s investment means the company no longer needs to invest in its own efforts to develop its own distribution plan for Hadoop.
This purchase gives Intel the opportunity to promote the version already in place along with its servers. This move could help put Intel at the center of the Internet of Things phenomenon, shifting the way the market perceives the brand, from hardware to applications provider. As companies are seeking the means to extract powerful information from massive data, the demand for Hadoop and similar solutions continues to expand.
Hadoop is truly in line with Intel’s core value proposition. It’s basically big data software that makes use of a group of servers in order to more rapidly and efficiently mine through the data to identify useful information. The data is managed by the software as it spreads it among the servers, using the allotted processing power to work on the data subset before combining the results. This is critical for businesses everywhere that want to stay ahead of the competition, or at least on par to maintain market presence.
Interestingly enough, Hadoop was originally developed by Yahoo! and was used heavily by giants such as Facebook (News - Alert) and Google before Cloudera emerged with an enterprise version. Given the possibilities this creates, Intel is likely on board for a fun ride.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson