Jun
02
2021
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With buyout, Cloudera hunts for relevance in a changing market

When Cloudera announced its sale to a pair of private equity firms yesterday for $5.3 billion, along with a couple of acquisitions of its own, the company detailed a new path that could help it drive back towards relevance in the big data market.

When the company launched in 2008, Hadoop was in its early days. The open source project developed at Yahoo three years earlier was built to deal with the large amounts of data that the Internet pioneer generated. It became increasingly clear over time that every company would have to deal with growing data stores, and it seemed that Cloudera was in the right market at the right time.

And for a while things went well. Cloudera rode the Hadoop startup wave, garnering a cool billion in funding along the way, including a stunning $740 million check from Intel Capital in 2014. It then went public in 2018 to much fanfare.

But the markets had already started to shift by the time of its public debut. Hadoop, a highly labor-intensive way to manage data, was being supplanted by cheaper and less complex cloud-based solutions.

“The excitement around the original promise of the Hadoop market has contracted significantly. It’s incredibly expensive and complex to get it working effectively in an enterprise context,” Casey Aylward, an investor at Costanoa Ventures told TechCrunch.

The company likely saw that writing on the wall when it merged with another Hadoop-based company, Hortonworks in 2019. That transaction valued the combined entity at $5.2 billion, almost the same amount it sold for yesterday, two years down the road. The decision to sell and go private may also have been spurred by Carl Icahn buying an 18% stake in the company that same year.

Looking to the future, Cloudera’s sale could provide the enterprise unicorn room as it regroups.

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategies sees the deal as a positive step for the company. “I think this is good news for Cloudera because it now has the capital and flexibility to dive head first into SaaS. The company invented the entire concept of a data life cycle, implemented initially on premises, then extended to private and public clouds,” Moorhead said.

Adam Ronthal, Gartner Research VP agrees that it at least gives Cloudera more room to make necessary adjustments its market strategy as long as it doesn’t get stifled by its private equity overlords. “It should give Cloudera an opportunity to focus on their future direction with increased flexibility — provided they are able to invest in that future and that this does not just focus on cost cutting and maximizing profits. Maintaining a culture of innovation will be key,” Ronthal said.

Which brings us to the two purchases Cloudera also announced as part of its news package.

If you want to change direction in a hurry, there are worse ways than via acquisitions. And grabbing Datacoral and Cazena should help Cloudera alter its course more quickly than it could have managed on its own.

“[The] two acquisitions will help Cloudera capture some of the value on top of the lake storage layer — perhaps moving into different data management features and/or expanding into the compute layer for analytics and AI/ML use cases, where there has been a lot of growth and excitement in recent years,” Alyward said.

Chandana Gopal, Research Director for the future of intelligence at IDC agrees that the transactions give Cloudera some more modern options that could help speed up the data wrangling process. “Both the acquisitions are geared towards making the management of cloud infrastructure easier for end-users. Our research shows that data prep and integration takes 70%-80% of an analyst’s time versus the time spent in actual analysis. It seems like both these companies’ products will provide technology to improve the data integration/preparation experience,” she said.

The company couldn’t stay on the path it was on forever, certainly not with an activist investor breathing down its neck. Its recent efforts could give it the time away from public markets it needs to regroup. How successful Cloudera’s turnaround proves to be will depend on whether the private equity companies buying it can both agree on the direction and strategy for the company, while providing the necessary resources to push the company in a new direction. All of that and more will determine if these moves pay off in the end.

Jun
01
2021
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Cloudera to go private as KKR & CD&R grab it for $5.3B

Cloudera was once one of the hottest Hadoop startups, but over time the shine has come off that market, and today it went private as KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a pair of private equity firms, announced they intended to purchase Cloudera for $5.3 billion. The company has a market cap of around $3.7 billion.

Cloudera and Hortonworks, two key startups in the Hadoop space, merged in 2018 for $5.2 billion. Cloudera was likely under pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, who took an 18% stake in the company in 2019 and now stands to gain from the sale, which the company stated represented a 24% premium for shareholders at $16 a share. Prior to the market opening this morning, the stock was sitting at $12.86.

Back in the day, about a decade ago, when Hadoop was the way to process big data, venture money was pouring into the space. Over time it lost some of its glow. That’s because it was highly labor intensive, and companies began moving to the cloud and looking at software services that did more of the work for them. More modern technologies like data lakes began replacing it and the company recognized that it must change its approach to survive in the modern data processing marketplace.

Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden sees the transaction as a way to do just that. “We believe that as a private company with the expertise and support of experienced investors such as CD&R and KKR, Cloudera will have the resources and flexibility to drive product-led growth and expand our addressable market opportunity,” Bearden said in a statement.

While there is a lot of executive jargon in that statement, it basically means that the company hopes that these private equity firms can give it some additional financial resources to move toward a more modern approach for processing large amounts of data.

While it was at it, Cloudera also announced a couple of acquisitions of its own to help it move toward that modernization goal. For starters, it grabbed Datacoral, a startup that abstracts away the infrastructure needed to build a data pipeline without using code. It also acquired Cazena, a startup that helps customers build cloud data lakes, giving the company a more modern approach to processing big data. Bearden sees both of these services helping Cloudera reposition itself in the big data self-service market

“Both businesses will enable our combined customers to enjoy a reduction in complexity and faster time to value for their data initiatives, leading to improved insights, faster innovation, and stronger engagements with their customers and partners,” Bearden said in a statement.

Cloudera went public in 2018, closing at $18.09 a share after raising $1 billion. The vast majority of that was a $740 million investment from Intel Capital in 2014. It’s worth noting that Cloudera bought Intel’s stake in the company at the end of last year for $314 million.

Hortonworks raised another $248 million. A third Hadoop startup, MapR, raised $280 million. The company’s assets were sold rather unceremoniously to HPE in 2019 for a price pegged at under $50 million, showing just how far the market has fallen since its earlier glory days.

The Cloudera deal includes a brief “go shop” provision that allows it to continue to look for a better deal. It’s doubtful it will find one, and if it doesn’t the transaction with KKR and CD&R is expected to close in the second half of this year subject to typical regulatory review. The company will announce earnings later today.

Mar
02
2021
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Airbyte raises $5.2M for its open-source data integration platform

Airbyte, an open-source data integration platform, today announced that it has raised a $5.2 million seed funding round led by Accel. Other investors include Y Combinator, 8VC, Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen, former Cloudera GM Charles Zedlewski, LiveRamp and Safegraph CEO Auren Hoffman, Datavant CEO Travis May and Alain Rossmann, the president of Machinify.

The company was co-founded by Michel Tricot, the former director of engineering and head of integrations at LiverRamp and RideOS, and John Lafleur, a serial entrepreneur who focuses on developer tools and B2B services. The last startup he co-founded was Anaxi.

Image Credits: Airbyte

In its early days, the team was actually working on a slightly different project that focused on data connectivity for marketing companies. The founders were accepted into Y Combinator and built out their application, but once the COVID pandemic hit, a lot of the companies that had placed early bets on Airbyte’s original project faced budget freezes and layoffs.

“At that point, we decided to go into deeper data integration and that’s how we started the Airbyte project and product as we know it today,” Tricot explained.

Today’s Airbyte is geared toward data engineering, without the specific industry focus of its early incarnation, but it offers both a graphical UI for building connectors, as well as APIs for developers to hook into.

As Tricot noted, a lot of companies start out by building their own data connectors — and that tends to work alright at first. But the real complexity is in maintaining them. “You have zero control over how they behave,” he noted. “So either they’re going to fail, or they’re going to change something. The cost of data integration is in the maintenance.”

Even for a company that specializes in building these connectors, the complexity will quickly outpace its ability to keep up, so the team decided on building Airbyte as an open-source company. The team also argues that while there are companies like Fivetran that focus on data integration, a lot of customers end up with use cases that aren’t supported by Airbyte’s closed-source competitors and that they had to build themselves from the ground up.

“Our mission with Airbyte is really to become the standard to replicate data,” Lafleur said. “To do that, we will open source every feature that addresses the need of the individual contributor, so all the connectors.” He also noted that Airbyte will exclusively focus on its open-source tools until it raises a Series A round — likely early next year.

To monetize its service, Airbyte plans to use an open-core model, where all of the features that address the needs of a company (think enterprise features like data quality, privacy, user management, etc.) will be licensed. The team is also looking at white-labeling its containerized connectors to others.

Currently, about 600 companies use Airbyte’s connectors — up from 250 just a month ago. Its users include the likes of Safegraph, Dribbble, Mercato, GraniteRock, Agridigital and Cart.com.

The company plans to use the new funding to double its team from about 12 people to 25 by the end of the year. Right now, the company’s focus is on establishing its user base, and then it plans to start monetizing that — and raise more funding — next year.


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Aug
07
2019
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With MapR fire sale, Hadoop’s promise has fallen on hard times

If you go back about a decade, Hadoop was hot and getting hotter. It was a platform for processing big data, just as big data was emerging from the domain of a few web-scale companies to one where every company was suddenly concerned about processing huge amounts of data. The future was bright, an open source project with a bunch of startups emerging to fulfill that big data promise in the enterprise.

Three companies in particular emerged out of that early scrum — Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR — and between them raised more than $1.5 billion. The lion’s share of that went to Cloudera in one massive chunk when Intel Capital invested a whopping $740 million in the company. But times have changed.

2018 china ipos

Via TechCrunch, Crunchbase, Infogram

Falling hard

Just yesterday, HPE bought the assets of MapR, a company that had raised $280 million. The deal was pegged at under $50 million, according to multiple reports. That’s not what you call a healthy return on investment.

Jan
03
2019
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Cloudera and Hortonworks finalize their merger

Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest players in the Hadoop big data space, today announced that they have finalized their all-stock merger. The new company will use the Cloudera brand and will continue to trade under the CLDR symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Today, we start an exciting new chapter for Cloudera as we become the leading enterprise data cloud provider,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer of Cloudera, in today’s announcement. “This combined team and technology portfolio establish the new Cloudera as a clear market leader with the scale and resources to drive continued innovation and growth. We will provide customers a comprehensive solution-set to bring the right data analytics to data anywhere the enterprise needs to work, from the Edge to AI, with the industry’s first Enterprise Data Cloud.”

The companies describe the deal as a “merger of equals,” though Cloudera stockholders will own about 60 percent of the equity in the company.

The combined company expects to generate more than $720 million in revenue from its 2,500 customers that rely on it to help them manage the complexities of processing their data. While Hadoop itself is open source and freely available, Cloudera and Hortonworks abstract away most of the infrastructure. Both focused on slightly different markets, though, with Hortonworks going after a more technical user and a pure open-source approach, while Cloudera also offered some proprietary tools.

“Together, we are well-positioned to continue growing and competing in the streaming and IoT, data management, data warehousing, machine learning/AI and hybrid cloud markets,” said Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden back when the deal was first announced. “Importantly, we will be able to offer a broader set of offerings that will enable our customers to capitalize on the value of their data.”

Sep
07
2017
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Cloudera acquires AI research firm Fast Forward Labs

 Cloudera said today as part of its second-quarter earnings report that it is acquiring Fast Forward Labs, a startup that gives companies the latest information on how to apply machine learning and AI to their businesses, as well as consulting. Read More

Aug
21
2017
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In-memory database provider Redis Labs raises $44M

 Redis Labs, a database company that specializes in in-memory databases, said today it has raised $44 million in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs. Read More

Apr
28
2017
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Cloudera finishes up 20% in stock market debut

 After pricing its IPO at $15 per share, Cloudera, the enterprise big data company, closed the day up more than 20 percent, at $18.09. This also is above the range of $12 to $14 for which Cloudera was preparing. Read More

Apr
01
2017
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Cloudera finally ready for the public stage

TechCrunch's Ron Miller on stage with Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly at the Intel Capital Summit in 2014. When I first met Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly in 2015 at the Intel Capital Summit, we were about to go on stage for a fireside chat to discuss among other things Intel’s massive investment in his company.
While on stage, the conversation inevitably turned to when the company might go public. As you might expect, he gave me the standard startup CEO answer. While Cloudera was certainly of… Read More

Dec
29
2016
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How viral open-source startups can build themselves into enterprise-IT powerhouses

Striped Halftone Pattern Hordes of new enterprise-IT upstarts have popped up in Silicon Valley, with some drawing lofty valuations from investors. They’re driven by new, more-advanced technologies in areas such as databases, software development, networking and cloud computing. And many are taking aim at incumbents like Dell, EMC, Oracle and IBM. But will these new companies ever be as valuable as those big names? Read More

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