Over the past two years, Cloudera has demonstrated the power of surrounding emerging open source software with support services, expertise and its own IP. The firm has  racked up over 30 customers since its founding in late 2008, and emerged as the leading source of Apache Hadoop. Cloudera's recent C round of financing brought its funding to $36 million, and it has been investing aggressively, with 45 employees, a very visible voice on the Big Data circuit and a stellar, experienced leadership team. It evangelizes through training, thought leadership, and increasingly through a growing sales and marketing team.

One indicator of Cloudera's precocity has been its prioritization of key alliances - higher than many firms its size - and that strategy is likely to have a big payoff if the partnerships are well executed and bring the marketplace momentum and the value they promise to fruition. Two key recent announcements involved Membase and Informatica. I've discussed the latter in another post - here I'll talk about why the Membase deal makes so much sense.

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Cloudera's continuing focus on the implications of explosive data growth has led it to another key partnership, this time with Informatica.
Connecting to the dominant player in data integration and data quality
expands the opportunity for Cloudera dramatically; it enables the de facto commercial Hadoop leader to find new ways to empower the "silent majority" of data. The majority of data is outside;
not just outside enterprise data warehouses, but outside RDBMS
instances entirely. Why? Because it doesn't need all the management
features database management software provides - it doesn't get updated
regularly, for example. In fact, it may not be used very often at all,
though it does need to be persisted for a variety of reasons. I recently
mentioned Cloudera's success of late; it's going to be challenged by some big players in 2011, notably IBM, whose recent focus on Hadoop
has been remarkably nimble. So these deals matter. A lot. The Data
Management function is being refactored before our eyes; both these
vendors will play in its future.

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Microsoft chose a user group meeting, Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), for the rollout of its long-awaited, and late, SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse
(note, yet again, how foolish it is for vendors to trap themselves with
dates in product names.) PDW is late to market; there are other MPP
DBMS players there already, and Microsoft is behind in functionality
compared to some of them. Some of the most eagerly--awaited features are
evidently not slated for the first release. It's also far behind its
originally planned ship date following the acquisition of DatAllegro in
2008.

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