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Don't touch my trunk! Intel is $740m lighter after Cloudera cash shot

Huge funding deal keeps Oracle, IBM away from upstart's yellow elephant

Intel has shoveled $740m into Hadoop company Cloudera, giving the chipmaker an 18 per cent stake in the data analysis firm.

The mammoth funding was announced on Monday following the news last week of a major strategic partnership between the x86 goliath and the software upstart, which itself followed a separate funding round of $160m from companies including Google Ventures.

When an Intel executive told us last week that the rumored $90m in funding it had given Cloudera was an "underestimate" we wondered by how much – now we know that figure was off by an astonishing $650m.

Intel's stake values the Hadoop company at $4.070bn.

"These investments give us significant financial resources to accelerate growth and deliver long-term sustainable value to our customers and partners," said Cloudera's chief financial officer, Jim Frankola, in a canned statement.

The vast amount of the money will be used to develop new technology including a team to help shepherd Intel's own Hadoop patches into Cloudera's source code; expand its sales teams into Europe, Asia and China; and grow its field engineering and support teams.

Cloudera has been considered a prime buyout target for an incumbent enterprise IT company like SAP or Oracle or IBM.

But with Intel's significant ownership a buyout could prove difficult. Also, it would be "awkward" for a non-x86 company to vie for a seat on the data fiddler's board, Cloudera's chief exec told El Reg last week.

Cloudera had not returned requests for further information at the time of writing. The financing deal should close in the second quarter of 2014. ®

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