Hadoop vendor Cloudera announced on Tuesday that the company’s “[p]reliminary unaudited total revenue surpassed $100 million” in 2014. That the company, which is still privately held, would choose to disclose even that much information about its finances speaks to the fast maturation, growing competition and big egos in the Hadoop space.
While $100 million is a nice, round benchmark number, the number by itself doesn’t mean much of anything. We still don’t know how much profit Cloudera made last year or, more likely, how big of a loss it sustained. What we do know, however, is that it earned more than bitter rivals [company]Hortonworks[/company] (it claimed $33.4 million through the first nine months of 2014, and will release its first official earnings report next week) and probably MapR (I’ve reached out to MapR about this and will update this if I’m wrong). However, Cloudera claims 525 customers are paying for its software (an 85 percent improvement since 2013), while MapR in December claimed more than 700 paying customers.
Cloudera also did about as much business as EMC-VMware spinoff Pivotal claims its big data business did in 2014. On Tuesday, Pivotal open sourced much of its Hadoop and database technology, and teamed up with Hortonworks and a bunch of software vendors large and small to form a new Hadoop alliance called the Open Data Platform. Cloudera’s Mike Olson, the company’s chief strategy officer and founding CEO, called the move, essentially, disingenuous and more an attempt to save Pivotal’s business than a real attempt to advance open source Hadoop software.
All of this grandstanding and positioning is part of a quest to secure business in a Hadoop market that analysts predict will be worth billions in the years to come, and also an attempt by each company to prove to potential investors that its business model is the best. Hortonworks surprised a lot of people by going pubic in December, and the stock has remained stable since then (although its share price dropped more than two percent on Tuesday despite the news with Pivotal). Many people suspect Cloudera and MapR will go public this year, and Pivotal at some point as well.
This much action should make for an entertaining and informative Structure Data conference, which is now less than a month away. We’ll have the CEOs of Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR all on stage talking about the business of big data, as well as the CEO of Apache Spark startup Databricks, which might prove to be a great partner for Hadoop vendors as well as a thorn in their sides. Big users, including Goldman Sachs, ESPN and Lockheed Martin, will also be talking about the technologies and objectives driving their big data efforts.
